My thoughts & experiences with D so far, as a novice D coder

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, March 29, 2013 04:01:40 Vidar Wahlberg wrote:
> Or is it
> unthinkable that I mistook arrays and Ranges for being
> interchangeable when the examples pass an array to a function
> that takes a Range?

I don't think that it's unthinkable at all (and arrays _are_ ranges; it's just 
that in the case of output ranges, arrays act a bit oddly). The documentation 
should probably be improved to make such a mistake less likely.

> Ranges is something that's going to be new for a lot of people
> entering this language. When you know how arrays and ranges works
> in D I'm sure this makes perfect sense, but until you learn that,
> this is something that likely will confuse many people.
> 
> Hopefully the article about ranges will clear things up for me.

Yes. Ranges are incredibly powerful, but while the concept doesn't originate 
with D, AFAIK, actually using them in a serious API (particularly in a 
standard library) is unique to D. And our lack of good tutorials on them is 
probably our biggest documentation problem. It definitely needs to be fixed.

- Jonathan M Davis