std.Stream.InputStream convenience functions

[bitwise via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 5 September 2015 at 06:15:17 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Friday, 4 September 2015 at 22:36:01 UTC, bitwise wrote:
>> On Friday, 4 September 2015 at 14:40:43 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
>> wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> Wow...this is surprising. At first glance, the streams seemed 
>> to be fairly well done. What's the reason for them being 
>> removed? and what is meant to be the replacement?
>
> It's old (from D1) and does not follow the current best 
> practices or idioms. If we're going to have a stream solution, 
> it needs to be range-based. That being said, ranges in and of 
> themselves get pretty close to streams, and there simply hasn't 
> been a push to come up with a range-based stream solution where 
> the pieces that aren't already part of ranges are taken care 
> of. std.stream has been marked as scheduled for deprecation for 
> years, and no one has bothered to replace it. It comes up 
> periodically, but no one seems to care enough to do anything 
> about it. So, rather than leave it in that state, we decided 
> that it would be better off to just deprecate it and then get 
> rid of it rather than leave it in limbo with the documentation 
> saying that it's not up to our standards and that we're going 
> to get rid of it at some point. At some point, someone may come 
> up with a range-based stream solution and get it into Phobos, 
> but until then, we'll just use straight up ranges, which come 
> close enough for most cases. std.stdio and std.mmfile make it 
> quite possible to operate on files with ranges in a manner 
> similar to streams, and std.stdio allows you to operate on 
> stdin and stdout in a similar manner (since they're 
> std.stdio.Files).
>
> That being said, std.stream is boost-licensed, and anyone is 
> free to copy it or fork it so long as the copyright notice is 
> left on it. So, anyone who wants to use std.stream in their own 
> code even after it's no longer in Phobos is free to do so. It's 
> just that the std.stream code is then going to have to be part 
> of their project rather than Phobos.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Thanks for the explanation, but could you give an example of how 
Stream would be rangified?

In the containers I'm writing, I'm returning a range from the 
findAll() function instead of an array:
https://github.com/bitwise-github/d-containers/blob/master/collections/list.d#L901

I suppose any method returning an array/string could work like 
this...Is this what you mean?

It doesn't seem like the entire Stream class should have to be 
removed to make this change though.