[Issue 9326] writeln to simply show pointed data

[d-bugmail at puremagic.com]

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9326



--- Comment #2 from bearophile_hugs at eml.cc 2013-01-16 03:11:59 PST ---
(In reply to comment #1)

Thank you for your comment.

> I don't think that stuffing various debugging trickery into writeln is a good
> idea.

I keep hearing similar comments since few years ago I asked for a better
printing of associative arrays and arrays in D. But once you give D programmers
such better printing (thanks to Hara work), they seem happy and unwilling to go
back to a more limited printing.

It's not a trick, showing what a pointer points to is printing of a basic
built-in data structure of the language.

Probably I got spoiled by modern dynamic languages, that being often used on
the REPL, enjoy having good default printing.

If you think this enhancement request is not a good idea, you must explain why.
I have explained why it's a handy thing to have.

(The implementation of this feature requires the formatting function to keep a
set of already seen pointers. For simplicity I think a built-in associative
array of void* is enough).


> What about a dedicated primitive that may (by default!) use more convenient
> formating fot this purpose?

Once the improved format() is implemented in Phobos, what's the point of
artificially restricting the usefulness of writeln()?

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