[GSOC] regular expressions beta is here

[bearophile]

Dmitry Olshansky:

> Honestly I can't get why you are so nervous about code style anyway, you 
> seem to bring this up way to often.

I bring it often because many D programmers seem half blind to this problem. I am not willing to go to the extremes Go language goes to solve this problem, but I'd like more recognition of this problem in D programmers. A bit more common style is quite helpful to create an ecology of D programmers that share single modules. I guess D programmers are used to C/C++ languages, where there are not modules and where programs are usually made of many files. So they don't see why sharing single modules in the pool is so useful.


> About spaces personally I dislike eating extra vertical space for 
> "clarity", curly braces on it's own line is already way too much.

Think about reading a book without the half lines between paragraphs. In code it's the same. Some empty lines are good to improve readability of the code. Curly braces are not always present, sometimes a paragraphs ends before or after or right on a curly brace.


> Have to respectfully disagree on this, don't try to nail everything on 
> contracts.

Contracts don't replace unittests, they complement each other.


> They are nice but have little value over plain assert 
> _unless_ we are talking about classes and _inheritance_, which isn't the 
> case here.

It's easy to forget to test the output of a function, the "out" contracts help here. In structs the invariant helps you avoid forgetting to call manually a sanity test function every time you come in and out of a method.


> And there are lots of asserts here, but much more of input is 
> enforced since it's totally expected to supply wrong pattern (or have an 
> outside  user to type in the pattern).

The idea is to replace those enforces with asserts, and allow user programs to import Phobos stuff that still contain asserts (from a secondary Phobos lib). Enforces are for certain kinds of user code, I don't think they are fit in Phobos.

Bye,
bearophile