Phobos packages a bit confusing

[retard]

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:51:19 +0000, dsimcha wrote:

> == Quote from Nick Sabalausky (a at a.a)'s article
>> "retard" <re at tard.com.invalid> wrote in message
>> news:heuh3h$o71$3 at digitalmars.com...
>> > Hi
>> >
>> > after using D1 and Tango for couple of years we decided to experiment
>> > with D2 and Phobos in a small scale project. For some reason the
>> > mostly flat package hierarchy seemed rather confusing.
>> >
>> > For instance, it took two of us 15 minutes to build a program that
>> > reads a line from user, converts the string to a natural number, adds
>> > one, and finally prints it to the screen. Entities like 'stdin' seem
>> > to have no documentation at all. What should I import to get it, what
>> > interfaces does it implement etc.
>> >
>> I actually find that kind of ironic, because that's pretty much how I
>> feel about tango's ultra-separation-mania. I use tango all the time and
>> I still can't do a single IO operation without spending at least ten
>> minutes hunting blindly through the docs and finally finding what I
>> need (including the necessary documentation) is spread out across at
>> least three different modules.
> 
> Yeah, I dislike Tango's (and Java's) I/O design.  I think it's a classic
> example of overengineering.  I don't care how efficient, flexible,
> complete, etc. it is if it doesn't "just work" for the simple stuff.

Are you sure you know what you're talking about?

> By
> far the two most important pieces of I/O functionality I need are:
> 
> 1.  Read a text file line-by-line.

foreach (line; new Lines!(char) (new File ("foobar.txt")))
  Cout (line).newline;
}

> 2.  Read a whole file into an array of bytes.

new File("foobar.bin").read()


Java isn't that bad IMO - you just have to remember the buffer:

BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo"));
try {
  String line = null;

  while (( line = input.readLine()) != null) {
  }
}
finally {
  input.close();
}

> 
> These are common, simple I/O operations that just about everyone needs
> fairly often.  It's ridiculous if I have to use three different modules
> or whatever it takes to accomplish something so simple.
> 
> I'm convinced that this is one thing that turns a lot of people off to
> programming if they get past the first hurdle of understanding variable
> assignment.  File I/O is required for almost any program complicated
> enough to be worth writing.  When a beginner who doesn't necessarily
> even understand the concept of a class hierarchy well sees a huge
> overengineered API for basic file I/O, he/she is bound to think
> (wrongly) that programming is much harder than it really is and that
> he/she is just inept at it.

Well, that's not the only problem a novice meets during the first 
minutes / hours with a new language. If you write e.g. console apps for 
win32, you need to teach them what code pages are, why do you need to 
convert between utf-8 and windows-1252 etc. since the default console i/o 
routines are not unicode aware under windows.