auto: useful, annoying or bad practice?

[Neia Neutuladh]

On Friday, 18 May 2018 at 10:09:20 UTC, Chris wrote:
> In a way Java has slowly been moving in that direction anyway, 
> cf. this answer [2] that reminded me of D's `auto` return type.
> [2] 
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1348199/what-is-the-difference-between-the-hashmap-and-map-objects-in-java

Except the return type that you wrote in that case tells you 
almost everything you can do with that value. If you specify the 
return type of a function as `auto`, it tells you nothing. The 
Java equivalent would be to return Object.