Phobos packages a bit confusing

[KennyTM~]

On Nov 30, 09 14:02, retard wrote:
> 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;
> }
>

yuck.

>> 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();
> }
>

yuck yuck yuck.

>>
>> 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.