TickDuration.to's second template parameter

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, April 07, 2012 15:59:57 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Whenever I use TickDuration.to, I need to add the pesky second argument,
> e.g. TickDuration.to!("nsecs", uint). Would a default make sense there?
> 
> Also, double doesn't work, although I sometimes could use that.
> 
> 
> Thoughts? Destroyers?

That's odd. I was sure that I responded to this earlier, but my post seems to 
have disappeared. So, I'll try again.

TickDuration has the seconds, msecs, usecs, and nsecs functions which 
effectively gives you to with a default of long for each of the units supported 
by TickDuration. So, that's the closest that it has to default arguments. I 
don't think that it would really make sense to give to default arguments to to 
on top of that. So, if you really want uint rather than long, you'd do either

auto value = td.to!("nsecs", uint)();

or

auto value = cast(uint)td.nsecs;

As for double, it should work. SHOO had had functions similar to seconds, 
msecs, usecs, and nsecs which defaulted to real, but I removed them a while 
back, because it made it too confusing to keep them all straight. But to 
should work with integral values with a size of at least 4 bytes as well as 
all floating point types. The unit tests do test real, but they don't test 
double at all. So, it's possible that there's a bug which prevents it from 
working, but both float and double should work. If they don't, it's a bug which 
needs to be reported and fixed.

- Jonathan M Davis