[Issue 18124] std.regex.RegexMatch's front property is under-documented

d-bugmail at puremagic.com d-bugmail at puremagic.com
Sat Dec 30 15:25:08 UTC 2017


https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18124

Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           Keywords|                            |ddoc
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
                 CC|                            |schveiguy at yahoo.com
         Resolution|WONTFIX                     |---
            Summary|Over-use of `auto` return   |std.regex.RegexMatch's
                   |type in std.regex           |front property is
                   |                            |under-documented
           Severity|enhancement                 |trivial

--- Comment #4 from Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> ---
(In reply to Seb from comment #1)
> Advantage of `auto`:
> - we can change the API

No, you can't change the API. People depend on the API being the way it is. You
can change the result's innards (read: private members) whether it's auto or
not, but what auto does allow is changing the NAME of the result, and not break
any code. In other words, it forces you to use auto when receiving the result.
But this is only for private or voldemort types. In this case, we are defining
the type publicly, so using auto here just avoids writing out the type itself.

Another advantage of auto is when you want to return different types based on
static introspection. This allows a much DRYer mechanism than somehow
generating the return type (and the result can look a lot worse than using
auto).

> - less visual clutter (that's subjective though)

Well, we need to describe what the result actually can do. In this case, it
seems the result is under-documented, so we should do *something* to fix that.
Looking at the code, it seems it's returning a defined struct in the file
itself, so we should just document it properly.

(In reply to Neia Neutuladh from comment #2)
> Just a tip: emoticons can make an otherwise professional comment seem smarmy
> or condescending. If you do not intend to seem smarmy or condescending, you
> may wish to avoid them.

Just another tip: you may want to avoid taking unnecessary offense at innocuous
things for no reason. Most people in our organization are friendly and cheerful
people, including Seb. Thanks! ;)

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