One way to look at foreach as not so bad

[Bill Baxter]

One of the things I've said recently I find distasteful about foreach 
(not even foreach_reverse, just plain foreach) is that in the statement 
foreach(i; &obj.foreach){}  'foreach' doesn't really 'foreach' anything. 
  The method obj.foreach is the one that really contains the "for each" 
loop, and obj.foreach is the one that really decides if it will even be 
"for each item" or only "for some items".

In short 'foreach' only means 'foreach' if you use it in a particular way.

It occurred to me, though, that a similar argument applies to good old 
'for'.

   for(i=0; i<3; i++) {}

C's 'for' is really totally cryptic if you think about it.  And can do 
just about anything you want it to, including things having nothing to 
do with 'for'-ing.
   for(do_laundry();  wash_car() ; clean_room()) {
      take_out_the_trash();
   }
That's legal, but whatever it's doing sure is not 'for'-ing anything.

I kind of stopped seeing that years ago though.  Thinking back, however, 
I can remember the very early days staring at the first few 'for' 
statements I ever saw in K&R, trying to figure out what the heck all 
those semicolons were doing, and why good old "for i=1 to 10" wasn't 
good enough, and later flipping back and forth in K&R to figure out 
for-loop code later in the book.

foreach is pretty similar.  It may have many uses that have nothing to 
do with 'foreach'-ing, and the meaning of the semicolon is meaningless 
and unclear at first, but I'll probably get used to it.

That doesn't mean it's an optimal design, though. ;-P

Nor does it mean that I wouldn't like trailing delegates to work also:
     obj.each() (int i) {
       writefln(i);
     }

Maybe I can get used to this version that works now:
     obj.each( (int i) {
       wrietfln(i);
     })

But it just looks weird to have my loop body inside the parens, and will 
look even weirder if nested
     obj.each( (Obj c) {
       c.each( (int i) {
         writefln(i);
       })
     })

It sort of looks like nested loops, but I just can't get excited about 
all those })'s screaming out "I'm a not a loop! I'm a function call!".

All that's just about plain 'foreach'.  I still can't see a good 
justification for foreach_reverse.  Reverse iteration just isn't common 
enough to justify a special case like that.

--bb