dmd 1.057 and 2.041 release

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:33:01 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> In wake of printing multi-dimensional arrays, I agree that start and end  
> delimiters should be present by default. If delimiters are present, it  
> only makes sense to make the array look like a D array, so the ", "  
> becomes an acceptable proposition.

That's great!

> I'm unsure about strings - should "to" go all gung-ho on quoting and  
> escaping quotes etc.? That's a bit odd. Consider:
>
> auto str = to!string("hello world");
>
> I'd expect the call to be an identity application that makes str equal  
> to "hello world". So far so good. Then say I convert with "to" an array  
> of strings to a string:
>
> auto str2 = to!string(["hello world"]);
>
> Now str2 is "\"hello world\"", i.e. has an extra pair of quotes.

I think you mean "[\"hello world\"]"

> So "to" applied to an array does not always use "to" applied to each  
> element of the array - it has a completely different behavior. I wonder  
> whether that's a desirable behavior.

I would say no.  I guess you could make the argument that strings are  
already arrays treated specially, but I don't think it adds much to put  
the quotes there.  Plus, it allows simpler code and documentation, you can  
define the conversion of an array as a purely recursive function, even if  
it may not be implemented that way.

Note that ranges should convert identically to arrays, making arrays  
special would make things odd.

> Another thing that's unclear to me is whether writeln and "to" should be  
> defined such that
>
> write(to!string(stuff))
>
> and
>
> writeln(stuff)
>
> produce the same text. Currently that's the general plan, but I wonder  
> whether we should change the approach.

I like that, it shows consistency.  If you want to change the format, you  
can via to's parameters.  But the most useful defaults should be the same  
in writeln.

Even though to is a way to get a crude serialization function, I don't  
know if it will be sufficient or efficient for a serious serialization  
library (i.e. I don't think it's worth making 'to' that smart).  But it is  
sufficient as a debug tool, it just needs better defaults.

-Steve