auto: useful, annoying or bad practice?

[Charles Hixson]

auto has its uses, but it's wildly overused, especially in library code 
and documentation, and really, really, *really* much so in documentation 
examples.


On 05/01/2018 06:09 AM, Craig Dillabaugh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Monday, 30 April 2018 at 21:11:07 UTC, Gerald wrote:
>> I'll freely admit I haven't put a ton of thought into this post 
>> (never a good start), however I'm genuinely curious what people's 
>> feeling are with regards to the auto keyword.
>>
>> Speaking for myself, I dislike the auto keyword. Some of this is 
>> because I have a preference for static languages and I find auto adds 
>> ambiguity with little benefit. Additionally, I find it annoying that 
>> the phobos documentation relies heavily on auto obscuring return 
>> types and making it a bit more difficult to follow what is happening 
>> which gives me a bad taste for it.
>>
> clip
>>
>> So I'm curious, what's the consensus on auto?
>
> As some have pointed out, it certainly has value. For example, in 
> functions returning ranges, etc. where you wouldn't want to have to 
> write out the whole type.
>
> However, as an infrequent D user I admit I prefer to see the actual 
> type where it is feasible, as I find 'auto' is a barrier to 
> understanding to someone who isn't familiar with a particular piece of 
> code.  I would never use auto in place of a basic type.
>
>