range behaviour

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 13 May 2014 at 17:32:21 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> Lastly, since the range API is an *abstraction*, it should not 
> dictate
> any concrete implementation details such as whether .empty can 
> do
> non-trivial initialization work. Properly-written range-based 
> code
> should be able to handle all possible implementations of the 
> range API,
> including those that do non-trivial work in .empty.

An API is a "user" interface. It should be intuitive.

Besides, D ranges will never perform as well as an optimized 
explicit loop, so you might as well aim for usability over speed. 
I learned this over 15 years ago when I was fed up with STL 
begin/end and implemented my own inlined iterators that work like 
D ranges ( for a scanline renderer ).