questions on PhanTango 'merger' (was Merging Tangobos into Tango) - long-term vision

[Regan Heath]

Kris wrote:
> "Christopher Wright" <dhasenan at gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:fel8ir$1crd$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> I don't care about free functions versus objects, but I care about the 
>> amount of typing I have to do. And it seems that object names are about as 
>> long as function names, and method names are about as long as function 
>> names, so using an object-oriented interface involves twice as much 
>> typing.
>>
>> If you had "alias formatln fln" in Print, for instance, I could just 
>> write:
>> Stdout.fln("whatever");
>>
>> That's about a three character penalty above writefln, which I wouldn't 
>> notice. The current seven-character penalty is slightly annoying.
> 
> Noted, and thank you
> 
> 
>> I don't like instantiating objects in order to do a simple test:
>> if (new FilePath(path).exists && !new FilePath(path).isFolder) {
>>    // do stuff
>> }
>>
>> versus:
>> if (Path.exists(path) && Path.isFolder(path)) {
>>    // do stuff
>> }
> 
> This is definately a pain point I've heard often. The approach in Tango 
> would be something like:
> 
> auto path = FilePath ("some path");
>  if (path.exists && !path.isFolder) {
>     // do stuff
> 
> That's not so bad, is it? 

Well.. if we make the assumption that isFolder will return false if is 
doesn't exist all you're really asking is:

if (isFolder("some path")) {

and if that is the extent of it then the free function is more 
appropriate, it's quicker, easier, involves no heap allocation, etc.

In a more complicated situation I would argue for the class but that's 
the point I'm trying to make, in some situations one is more appropriate 
than the other.

Regan

p.s. to my mind the amount of typing involved isn't really important as 
copy+paste has been my friend for a long time and auto-completion almost 
as long.