Argumnentation against external function operator overloading is unconvincing

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, September 25, 2016 00:36:58 pineapple via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 22 September 2016 at 12:51:59 UTC, Andrei
>
> Alexandrescu wrote:
> > On 9/22/16 6:38 AM, pineapple wrote:
> >> The greatest offender I've found is how in phobos, arrays do
> >> not behave
> >> as ranges without importing the module defining their range
> >> operations.
> >
> > Would make sense to move those few primitives to object.d. I've
> > been thinking of that a long time ago but back then there was a
> > vague stance that object.d shouldn't contain templates. Since
> > then that has changed. -- Andrei
>
> I strongly disagree - I have been working a library that does not
> treat arrays as ranges, but as a type that a range can be created
> from. This design difference has proven rather elegant and solves
> a lot of problems I've run into using phobos. I think the
> (unlikely but ideal) solution is for phobos to adopt a similar
> approach, and not to warp the core language to accommodate
> phobos' strange design decisions.
>
> Also, auto-decoding is a plague and it need not spread any
> farther than it already has done.
>
> https://github.com/pineapplemachine/mach.d/blob/master/readme.md#arrays-aren
> t-ranges

Considering that a random access range is essentially an abstraction for a
dynamic array and that ranges were designed with that in mind, I don't know
how you can argue that dynamic arrays shouldn't be treated as ranges.

The auto-decoding is certainly an issue, but that only affects ranges of
char and wchar. The vast majority of dynamic arrays are perfectly normal
ranges.

- Jonathan M Davis