Adam D. Ruppe's "D Cookbook" now available!

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 29 May 2014 at 10:28:45 UTC, Chris wrote:
> I dug into Chapter 3 about ranges. It clarifies a lot of things 
> about ranges.

Yeah, a lot of the stuff there comes from my own process when 
writing my first range consuming function (which is still in a 
pretty ugly form in my sha.d on github, I have never really fixed 
it).

I had to ask on the newsgroup: what does it really mean to accept 
a generic input range? Does it mean to attempt data 
transformations to receive anything? Or is it semi-strict? (the 
answer is to take any input range but be strict on the element 
type - don't try to transform it yourself as that introduces bugs 
and hidden performance issues for the algorithm's user)

I didn't quite understand the answer until some time later and 
now I think it is fairly simple, but since I was so wrong about 
it for such a long while I figured other people probably had the 
same problems and tried to cover them in the book.

One of the sections there talks about emulating random access on 
a structure that doesn't really support it (a linked list) and 
focuses on the hidden performance. That's the range-writer side 
of the same range-consumer rule: don't try to get fancy and 
support something the underlying data doesn't natively do because 
then you'll introduce bugs and slowdowns that might be hard to 
find.