Should this work?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2014-01-09 15:07, Manu wrote:
> This works fine:
>    string x = find("Hello", 'H');
>
> This doesn't:
>    string y = find(retro("Hello"), 'H');
>    > Error: cannot implicitly convert expression (find(retro("Hello"),
> 'H')) of type Result!() to string
>
> Is that wrong? That seems to be how the docs suggest it should be used.

As other as said, the problem is that "find" returns a range, which is 
not implicitly convertible to "string". The main reason is to avoid 
temporary allocations when chaining algorithms.

If it was the other way around you would probably be complaining it 
wasn't efficient enough ;)

> On a side note, am I the only one that finds std.algorithm/std.range/etc
> for string processing really obtuse?
> I can rarely understand the error messages, so say it's better than STL
> is optimistic.
> Using std.algorithm and std.range to do string manipulation feels really
> lame to me.
> I hate looking through the docs of 3-4 modules to understand the
> complete set of useful string operations (std.string, std.uni,
> std.algorithm, std.range... at least).

You forgot std.array ;)

> I also find the names of the generic algorithms are often unrelated to
> the name of the string operation.
> My feeling is, everyone is always on about how cool D is at string, but
> other than 'char[]', and the builtin slice operator, I feel really
> unproductive whenever I do any heavy string manipulation in D.

You have built-in appending, concatenation, using strings in switch 
statements and so on.

> I also hate that I need to import at least 4-5 modules to do anything
> useful with strings... I feel my program bloating and cringe with every
> gigantic import that sources exactly one symbol.

I agree with you. I have built up a small library through out the years 
that basically allows me to only import a single module to do most 
string operations I need.

You probably don't like it but you could have a look at Tango as well. 
It contains two useful modules (for this case). One for handling 
arbitrary array operators and one for string operations.

tango.core.Array
tango.text.Util

https://github.com/SiegeLord/Tango-D2
http://siegelord.github.io/Tango-D2/

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg