Just because it's a slow Thursday on this forum

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 09:55:49AM -0500, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 02/10/2016 02:47 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 02:32:37PM -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >>On 02/10/2016 02:25 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> >>>I see no non-trivial cost.
> >>
> >>I, to, am not getting the cost story. H.S. Teoh, could you please
> >>substantiate? -- Andrei
> >
> >Sorry, I meant technical debt.  My point was that this function needs
> >to provide more value than what's effectively just an alias for
> >writefln("%s, %s, %s", x, y, z).
> >
> 
> Having used an equivalent to the proposed "dump" for many years (and
> an inferior equivalent at that), I can attest that it definitely
> provides sufficient value over write* functions. With write*, there's
> always either excess verbosity that just gets in the way of my "flow",
> or I can opt the succinct route and wind up looking at a dump of
> numbers finding it difficult to know what number is what variable. Any
> homemade wrapper/alias only creates even MORE work when trying to use
> it. Anyone may be skeptical of the reasons, but it doesn't matter
> because again, this is all direct personal experience, not
> hypothetical theorizing.
> 
> In short: Yes. Yes it does provide sufficient value. And the
> "technical debt" is still vastly less than the time, effort and bother
> of having to defend yet another clear improvement on the D perpetual
> debate forums.

Fair enough.

Personally, though, I find a bunch of comma-separated values very
unhelpful. It would be much better if they were labelled, e.g., if:

	int x, y, z;
	dump(x,y,z);

outputs:

	x=1, y=2, z=3

it would be much better than just:

	1, 2, 3

which is unclear which values belongs to which variable. Trivial to
figure out in this case, but it's not as obvious when interspersed
between other program output & debug messages. But maybe that's just a
matter of habit, and difference in personal debugging style.


T

-- 
Making non-nullable pointers is just plugging one hole in a cheese
grater. -- Walter Bright