Proposal: takeFront and takeBack

[monarch_dodra]

On Tuesday, 3 July 2012 at 17:22:17 UTC, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> writes:
>
> Couldn't you just overload popFront?
>
> have a void popFront which throws off the first element without
> returning anything, and an auto popFront which does return data.
>
> I'd always been taught that "pop" means "read a bit and chop it 
> off",
> which means that having to first read the front and then pop it 
> off
> (i.e., in two separate methods) feels rather counterintuitive to
> me. That's in addition to the fact that yes, there's a 
> performance
> issue.
>
> But hey, I've only been doing this D thing for a few weeks, so 
> feel free
> to ignore me if I'm not making any sense :-)

You can't overload by return value, so that is not possible.

As far as I can recall, I've always been taught that pop does NOT 
(should not) return a value. Rationale being it makes you pay for 
a read/copy you may not have asked for. That's the way C++ does 
it, and is what I've come to expect from any language.