std.xml should just go

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, February 11, 2011 17:01:31 bearophile wrote:
> Andrei:
> > Now we have a unified way of referring to elements in ranges. Walter's
> > excellent follow-up is that the compiler could use lowering such that
> > you don't even need to use first and last. You'd just use r[0] and r[$ -
> > 1] and the compiler would take care of handling these special cases.
> 
> Nice. Now you just need to lower the syntax  a~b  to mean chain(a,b) for
> lazy ranges, and we are starting to use ranges well enough, as lists in
> functional languages :-)

Except that then you get the issue of eager vs lazy concatenation. chain is lazy 
whereas ~ is eager, so that wouldn't fly.

Regardless, it sounds like it would be an idea best suited to D3 if there ever 
is one. It doesn't add enough value to be worth the breakage that it would cause 
(which appears to be Walter and Andrei's conclusion).

- Jonathan M Davis