D Conference Tango Phobos

[TomD]

kris Wrote:
[...]
> It's odd (and frustrating) how people wind up focusing on one or two 
> 'stylistic' things about Tango, and go ballistic over that, rather than 
> taking a closer look. Happy to hear that you have personally taken that 
> latter step.
Sorry for frustrating you...but I guess Janice and I made our point
not very clear. My first contact with Tango was around January, February this year, when it
was about to be moved to dsource. Lacking a decent debugger for D, console output is
extremely important. Looking at the Tango manual chapter I read about "conduits", a
word I had to look up in the dictionary in the first place. Leo tells me it is just another word 
for "pipe". Lots of lines about concepts, buffers, file handling, but not a single line how
I actually can output anything to the console. 

What I find extremely useful are a couple of (simple)  examples, this is how it looks
like, maybe a link to a comprehensive summary table, and now to the gory details.
How do I output a string, an int, a float? How do I read them back in?
OK, it looks like this, how do I change the formatting, and why does it look like that?

This satisfies the impatient programmer who just wants to look something up, and the 
interested reader that wants to go into the details. The beauty of Phobos is that it can be
seen as a libc wrapper with a couple of extensions (this is not really true, but a good first classification). Familiar ground. The documentation a bit like the FreePascal runtime
documentation. Sometimes too terse, but you always feel like you have section 3
of the man pages for the details. Sockets are bad in Phobos? Gee, just look at some
C-example and do the same. 

The point (for me) is that Tango is the newcomer, with a new concept, which needs
good points to convince people. And it is not just saying "but look, we have 600 pages
of documentation" when it makes me feel, yes, and I need to read all of them before
I start. 
Enough bashing, the tutorials are quite helpful.

I hope this was not too offending, at least it was intended to be constructive.

Ciao
Tom