Get rid of isInfinite()?

[Mehrdad]

On Tuesday, 26 June 2012 at 06:05:49 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> If you can't calculate the length in O(1), then you're stuck 
> using walkLength,
> which means iterating over the entire range to get its length. 
> And if that's
> the case, then you can't make it a random access range, because 
> for it to be a
> random access range, it either needs to have a length property 
> (which must be
> O(1)) or be infinite. And I would fully expect for your code to 
> run into a
> variety of bugs if you tried to claim that it was a length that 
> it wasn't
> (e.g. ulong.max), since a number of functions will expect that 
> that's its
> actual length and won't work properly if it's not.
>
> For a range to be random access, it must fulfill these 
> requirements:
>
> template isRandomAccessRange(R)
> {
>     enum bool isRandomAccessRange = is(typeof(
>     (inout int _dummy=0)
>     {
>         static assert(isBidirectionalRange!R ||
>                       isForwardRange!R && isInfinite!R);
>         R r = void;
>         auto e = r[1];
>         static assert(!isNarrowString!R);
>         static assert(hasLength!R || isInfinite!R);
>     }));
> }
>
> and I'm not sure that you can squeeze your range into that. You 
> could do it if
> you just read in the entire range and created another range 
> from it (be it an
> array or whatever), but you appear to be attempting something 
> which probably
> won't quite work with the current range design. I suspect that 
> you'd do better
> trying to claim that it wasn infinite rather than had a length, 
> but then you'd
> have to be able to deal with the fact that empty is always 
> false.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

I actually only needed length() because random access ranges 
required it (not because I did), but maybe I can avoid it some 
way without using random access ranges at all... I'll try to 
rework stuff. Thanks for the explanations.