On 28 March 2012 15:28, Andrei Alexandrescu <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote: >> In fact, why are any of the functions accepting and >> returning /Ranges/ which are internal types specific to the container? > > > Ranges are not internal to containers, they are the way containers are > manipulated.
But there is a Range struct inside each container, it implements the
Range interface, but as far as I am aware, it is its own type, and
therefore anything that explicitly expects a Range is going to
expecting its own internal type. From what I can tell, the internal
Range struct on each container is just the underlying storage
mechanism for that container, and you can even have more than one
defined internal Range for a container. The issue comes about that
several methods want that type. Now there may be some voodoo going on
that I don't understand, but it seems to me that I can't do some thing
like:
SList!int s = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7];
s.linearRemove([4]) // Arrays are ranges
To remove a certain value, because [4] is not a valid type, despite
the fact that isForwardRange!(int[]) returns true. This is because
although int[] is a range, it is not a Range (as in the inner type
inside SList named Range). This is incredibly confusing to people
reading the documentation, since Range and range could mean anything.
I guess what I want is the why's for everything, why do things return
certain values? Why do certain methods only accept data that was
pulled from the container in the first place? Simply saying that some
generally returns some value doesn't help, I need to know the whys
behind it. Is is because the common use case is that, is it because it
was the easiest way to do it, is it because you just randomly decided
to because you felt that void was a cop-out?
I just feel that the documentation could do with some work in this
regard, but I wasn't there when this was being designed, I don't know
the whys behind the decisions. If I point out where I think the
documentation is lacking, simply in a "That is completely useless"
kind of way, could somebody either update the documentation, or
provide me with better explanations.
I have also attached the screenshot you asked for, sorry for the
quality, I don't have the tools on my machine to deal with images
properly right now.
--
James Miller
<<attachment: screengrab.jpg>>
