Initialization of std.typecons.RefCounted objects

[monarch_dodra]

On Wednesday, 18 July 2012 at 13:32:39 UTC, 
travert at phare.normalesup.org (Christophe Travert) wrote:
> I think opIndex should return by reference. opIndexAssign is of 
> no help
> when the user want to use a function that takes a reference 
> (here
> Array.insert).

Having already brought this up before, the answer to that is that 
the containers inside "container" are meant to be "closed" and 
not give access to the addresses of their internals, so the 
return by value is on purpose:

Here is Andrei's post about this:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/ceftaiklanejfhodbpix@forum.dlang.org?page=2#post-jthdko:24231u:241:40digitalmars.com

That said, I had brought up the exact same issue here:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/bkozswmsgeibarowfwvq@forum.dlang.org

> It is normal that Array uses default construction when
> someone increases the array's length.
> Besides that point, I don't see why default-constructed Array 
> have an
> uninitialised Payload. This makes uninitialised Array behaves
> unexpectedly, because making a copy and using the copy will not 
> affect
> the original, which is not the intended reference value 
> behavior.

I think it would be better to "initialize on copy", rather than 
default initialize. There are too many cases an empty array is 
created, then initialized on the next line, or passed to 
something else that does the initialization proper.

You'd get the correct behavior, and everything else (except dupe) 
works fine anyways.