Motive behind !empty() with front() instead of Optional front()

[Paul Backus]

On Friday, 26 March 2021 at 13:38:01 UTC, vitoroak wrote:
>
> I think one reason is that unlike Rust, D doesn't have a safe 
> way to return Optional!(ref T) so we need front and empty so 
> Ranges can return the items by reference.

I believe with DIP 1000 it should be possible to return something 
like `Optional!(Ref!T)`, where `Ref!T` is a safe wrapper around a 
`T*`.

Of course the ideal would be to make `ref` itself into a type 
qualifier (`ref(T)`).