Should this work?

[John Colvin]

On Friday, 10 January 2014 at 14:02:21 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 10 January 2014 00:07, Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> 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.
>>
>> 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).
>> 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.
>> 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 won't start another annoying thread.
>
> What's the go with popFront()... it returns nothing?
> I almost always want to pop and return the front element. I 
> can't find a
> function to do that... have I missed something again?

Popping the front off a range doesn't necessarily require the 
work needed to return the front itself. A trivial example would 
be a range of e^n : popFront just incrememnts n but calculating 
front requires the relatively expensive exponentiation.

Also, it is legal call popFront on a range with only one element 
remaining, leaving it empty. It is not valid to then look at the 
front.

You want both at once? take a look at the various std.range.take*