deprecating std.stream, std.cstream, std.socketstream

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Sun, 13 May 2012 17:38:23 -0400, Walter Bright  
<newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> This discussion started in the thread "Getting the const-correctness of  
> Object sorted once and for all", but it deserved its own thread.
>
> These modules suffer from the following problems:
>
> 1. poor documentation, dearth of examples & rationale
>
> 2. toHash(), toString(), etc., all need to be const pure nothrow, but  
> it's turning out to be problematic for doing it for these classes
>
> 3. overlapping functionality with std.stdio
>
> 4. they should present a range interface, not a streaming one

I keep trying to avoid talking about this, because I'm writing a  
replacement library for std.stream, and I don't want to step on any toes  
while it's still not accepted.

But I have to say, ranges are *not* a good interface for generic data  
providers.  They are *very* good for structured data providers.

In other words, a stream of bytes, not a good range (who wants to get one  
byte at a time?).  A stream of UTF text broken into lines, a very good  
range.

I have no problem with getting rid of std.stream.  I've never actually  
used it.  Still, we absolutely need a non-range based low-level streaming  
interface to data.  If nothing else, we need something we can build ranges  
upon, and I think my replacement does a very good job of that.

-Steve