Get rid of isInfinite()?

[Mehrdad]

On Monday, 25 June 2012 at 17:28:27 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
> On Monday, 25 June 2012 at 17:26:23 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
>> I feel like isInfinite is useless for typical cases... the 
>> only "infinite" (perhaps I should call it "unbounded" 
>> instead?) range I've ever realistically come across is a 
>> stream, like console input or a network stream.
>>
>> Of course, isInfinite doesn't make any sense for any type of 
>> wrapper around console input -- is it true or false?
>> You can't tell, because it depends on whether the input is 
>> redirected.
>> If the console input was redirected, then it would be finite, 
>> with a certain length (the length of the file).
>> If not, then it would be infinite (er, unbounded).
>>
>> So IMHO, we should deprecate isInfinite entirely, and instead 
>> rely on length being size_t.max.
>>
>> Not only would it make more sense, but it would make it 
>> possible to create a random-access wrapper around an input 
>> range (like console input), which lazily fetches its data.
>> Then you can work with console input like a regular string!
>
> This also prompts another issue:
> The length of a range should be a long, not size_t.
>
> Otherwise there's no way we could possibly replace streams with 
> ranges. 32-bit systems have LOTS of common streams that are 
> over 2^32 bytes (e.g. DVD images, partition images, large 
> movies, etc.).

Moved the other part to a separate thread:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/wgulnffhhkorfvtzbnqb@forum.dlang.org#post-wgulnffhhkorfvtzbnqb:40forum.dlang.org