Input handling? (newbie alert!)

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday 11 September 2010 13:54:19 Cavalary wrote:
> Hm, to me "informatics" made sense :) Not sure if I ever heard it
> used in English, but it sounds more suitable than "computer
> science", which (no matter how it's officially used) sounds like
> it would include everything that deals with computers, so hardware
> as well.

Informatics is essentially the term used in at least some European languages 
other than English. Personally, I think that the name is no better - if not 
worse - than computer science, since it implies that it has to do with the study 
of information, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with computers, 
math, or logic. Apparently the term is already taken by more or less that 
anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics_(academic_field) . But I've 
never heard a term which really properly captured what computer science / 
informatics is.  All candidates have problems of one sort or another. In any 
case, I was just pointing out to Bearophile that the official English term is 
computer science so that he's better able to communicate in English (from this 
and other posts, I gather that English is not his first language, though he's 
definitely fluent). What the best term would technically be really isn't of 
consequence, since it's not like we really get to pick at this point.

> And thanks again. Haven't seen readln() used in any of the
> examples I glanced over, so would have had no idea about it
> otherwise...

The examples on D's site are generally both sparse and old. Many of the projects 
on dsource are either D1 and/or old, so it's not a great place to look for 
examples either. The reality of the matter at this point is that you're going to 
have to read through the Phobos docs if you want to find all of the functions 
which could be useful to you. Also, I think that many of the examples in the 
language documentation in particular (rather than the Phobos docs) are more 
likely to be C in style rather than taking advantage of more idiomatic D stuff 
like ranges. My guess is that that's because a fair bit of it was done by Walter 
rather than Andrei.

In any case, good examples of D code are rather lacking at this point, so you'll 
have to explore the Phobos docs yourself and pay attention to what people post. 
For that matter, you could dive in the Phobos code and have a look there. 
std.range and std.algorithm are probably particularly good to look at - though 
neither would really help you with I/O.

However, Andrei's recently published book "The D Programming Language" 
(typically referred to as TDPL around here) is a fantastic source for learning 
about D. So, if you haven't picked that up yet, I highly recommend it.  It's the 
best introductory book to a programming language that I've ever read (probably 
in part because it doesn't assume that you've never programmed in your life and 
have no clue what basic stuff like variables or if statements are - it does 
explain how they work in D though). Howeve, t does mean shelling out around $40, 
so whether it's worth it depends on how serious you are about learning and using 
D.

- Jonathan M Davis