dmd 1.057 and 2.041 release

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Ellery Newcomer wrote:
> On 03/09/2010 05:53 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:52:25 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Printing values with spaces between them is entirely fine for e.g. all
>>> numbers.
>>>
>>
>> You know what, you are right. Why should phobos cater to people wanting
>> to print something as arcane as a string array, or a multi-dimensional
>> array. People have no business using such constructs, they should be
>> punished by having to write their own routines.
>>
>> It's all one-dimensional arrays of numbers for me from now on!
>>
>> -Steve
> 
> and formatted in hex

In wake of printing multi-dimensional arrays, I agree that start and end 
delimiters should be present by default. If delimiters are present, it 
only makes sense to make the array look like a D array, so the ", " 
becomes an acceptable proposition.

I'm unsure about strings - should "to" go all gung-ho on quoting and 
escaping quotes etc.? That's a bit odd. Consider:

auto str = to!string("hello world");

I'd expect the call to be an identity application that makes str equal 
to "hello world". So far so good. Then say I convert with "to" an array 
of strings to a string:

auto str2 = to!string(["hello world"]);

Now str2 is "\"hello world\"", i.e. has an extra pair of quotes. So "to" 
applied to an array does not always use "to" applied to each element of 
the array - it has a completely different behavior. I wonder whether 
that's a desirable behavior.

(For the record, I agree that there are ambiguities if the quotes are 
not added and escaped etc. I just wonder whether that should be part of 
"to"s charter.)

Another thing that's unclear to me is whether writeln and "to" should be 
defined such that

write(to!string(stuff))

and

writeln(stuff)

produce the same text. Currently that's the general plan, but I wonder 
whether we should change the approach.


Andrei