Article: the feature that makes D my favorite programming language

[Paul Backus]

On Saturday, 25 July 2020 at 18:24:22 UTC, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Saturday, 25 July 2020 at 14:47:01 UTC, aberba wrote:
>> On Saturday, 25 July 2020 at 13:28:34 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>>> On Saturday, 25 July 2020 at 11:12:16 UTC, aberba wrote:
>>>> Oop! Chaining the writeln too could have increased the wow 
>>>> factor. I didn't see that.
>>>
>>> oh I hate it when people do that though, it just looks off to 
>>> me at that point.
>>
>> Ha ha. If you're writing idiomatic D code, why not not all in 
>> on it?
>
> It bugs me too, though I have done it.
>
> I think the right answer of why it is odd is because writeln is 
> void. As soon as it is placed on the end the chain is broken 
> and you can't expand on it.

This is no different from any other "sink" that consumes a range:

someSource
     .map!foo
     .filter!bar
     .splitter(baz)
     .each!quux;

`each` returns void [1], so using it ends the chain. But that's 
not a problem, because the whole *point* of using `each` is to 
consume the range.

[1] Not exactly, but close enough.