Weird issue with std.range.iota.length

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 12 February 2016 at 16:52:17 UTC, ixid wrote:
> On Friday, 12 February 2016 at 15:59:09 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
> wrote:
>> It would be far better IMHO to just do a check in iota and 
>> throw a RangeError if the length wouldn't fit in size_t. 
>> Having length ever be anything other than size_t is just going 
>> to cause problems with other ranges. On 32-bit systems, you 
>> lose out on the ability to have a range that covers all values 
>> of long or ulong, but that's of very limited usefulness 
>> anyway, and as long as the number of elements is no greater 
>> than size_t.max, it would be fine - which would cover 
>> virtually all use cases. No, it's not perfect, but allowing 
>> length to be anything but size_t just causes bugs - especially 
>> in generic code.
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> What about a template overload where you can set the length 
> type as separate from the type of the range elements?

No other range has anything but size_t for its length. It's what 
arrays use. It's what the container types use. Code in general is 
going to assume that length is size_t. I think that having any 
range types with a length type of anything but size_t is a 
mistake. It interacts badly with everything else. The post that 
started this thread is just one example of that.

- Jonathan M Davis