Yet another strike against the current AA implementation

[Georg Wrede]

Steve Teale wrote:
> Ranges, ranges! That's all I hear these days, and it looks to me like
> the continuing advance of D toward being a complete meta-language.
> 
> Where do I see ranges described in terms that an old hand can
> understand?
> 
> I'm constantly having to roll my own in many areas when I see how the
> meta stuff is implemented - like x ~= c to add a character to the end
> of an array - reallocation every time?
> 
> I thought D was supposed to be a systems programming language, not
> something that was guaranteed to win the universe obfuscated code
> competition.
> 
> I've been trying to keep my projects up to date and compilable with
> D2.0xx, but I think I'm going to give up on that and rewrite them for
> whatever the current version of D1 is.
> 
> I seriously think that the crew who are driving the development
> should realize that not all computer programmers are going to have an
> IQ of 140, and that any practical language should be comprehensible
> to a majority of its users.

It will, be patient. See below.

> Maybe the problem I'm complaining about is just a lack of
> documentation. Generating said from comments really does not hack it
> - comments are always skimped, and usually lie.
> 
> Before something like Ranges are implemented, there should be some
> sort of RFC process where they are properly described rather than a
> reliance on D users to have read every thread of the newsgroup, and
> remembered it all.

There's an illusion. And that illusion comes from the D newsgroups 
having "wrong" names.

The D2 newsgroup should have a name like "D2 discussion -- for D 
language development folks, enter at your own risk". And a *D1* 
newsgroup should then be for anybody who actually uses the language for 
something. Currently, actually, the D.learn newsgroup has sort-of 
assumed this functionality.

Being as it is (a de facto D2 development newsgroup), d.D will contain 
legthy discussions that meander and roam, possibly for months, before 
something crystallises, and the issue is settled (at least for the 
time). A lack of proper documentation belongs to this setup. (But then, 
one really has to congratulate Andrei, Phobos docs have *never* been as 
good as they are today!!!)


About ranges: I suspect that once D2 is solidified (and we start working 
on D3 :-) ), ranges will be easy to use, easy to understand, and 
practical. Incidentally, that same complaint could have been said about 
templates. It took more than a year to get the discussion settled down a 
bit, and today templates seem not impossible at all to begin using 
(unless you want to begin right with the hairy stuff). And earlier, it 
took two months of intense discussion here before Unicode, UTF and their 
relation to char, wchar and dchar got generally understood. Today you 
can program in D without much thinking about UTF, and things "just 
work". Even abroad.

But to sum it all, any project whose purpose is anything else than 
learning D2, should be written in D1.