phobo's std.file is completely broke!

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 09/15/2018 08:09 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 23:50:43 UTC, Josphe Brigmo wrote:
>> [...]
> 
> D is generally described as a system programming language. There is 
> value in favoring a simple and obvious implementation ("do what I say") 
> over going out of one's way to make usage simpler ("do what I mean"). 
> The tradeoff is performance and complexity. Performance is generally an 
> important factor for users of system programming languages, and 
> complexity is a source of unforeseen problems in non-trivial use cases.
> 
> Consider, for example, how integers are treated in D and Python. D's 
> integers are fixed-length and roll over on overflow. Python integers are 
> bigints, which makes them slower, but can handle numbers of any size.
> 
>  From your posts, it sounds like you're looking for a programming 
> language closer to Python than to D.
> 

D's philosophy is (or at least is supposed to be) "Whenever possible, 
the right thing should be default, alternatives should still be 
possible." (And if I'm mistaken on that, then I've very much chosen the 
wrong language to use.)

Note that this does not contradict D's integer behaviour, because 
changing that would be *prohibitively* expensive and cause the need for 
workarounds to be common yet very difficult (if even possible). 
Therefore, it is a justifiable exception to the rule.

By contrast, I find it difficult to believe that a fix to the OP's 
problem would be prohibitively expensive. Of course, maybe I'm wrong. 
And maybe, as some have vaguely suggested, the WinAPI makes a correct 
fix impossible. **BUT**, unfortunately, I (as well as the OP) have no 
way to know because there appears to be a distressingly blatant LACK of 
technical discussion on the specific OP problem itself. Instead, all I'm 
seeing is a bunch of high-level design-philosophy bickering left 
completely divorced from the specifics of the original problem in question.

Yes, the OP needs to file a bug report (and if he's already done so, 
then please post a link here for our reference). But sheesh, people, 
it's *no wonder* he's gotten upset about it. I would too, and so would 
most of the rest of you (I've seen it happen).