Removing from SList (std.container)...

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, June 27, 2012 08:25:04 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jun 2012 05:37:00 -0400, Minas Mina
> 
> <minas_mina1990 at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> > How can I do that?
> > 
> > Why not list.remove(x); like in STL?
> 
> SList is quite unusable.
> 
> If you are looking for STL-like containers, there is dcollections which
> has a doubly-linked list, and supports syntax like you want.
> 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/dcollections

There concept of SList is unusable IMHO. The singly-linked list is one of the 
most useless data structures ever invented. It does have some use cases, but 
almost always what you really want is doubly-linked list.

As for std.container, the basics of std.container are good, but the 
documentation isn't good enough for some basic stuff, and some of it needs to 
be ironed out a bit. For instance, the basic idea of how remove works is fine 
given how ranges work (though it's arguably one of those few places where 
ranges are worse than iterators - hence why dcollections has cursors), and 
it's exactly what you want in the general case, but it's arguably overly 
complicated for a lot of basic use cases. Adding stuff like removeFirst which 
removed the first value which matched would greatly simplify a number of basic 
use cases.

I've been meaning to figure out a small set of basic functions like that which 
would improve the API's usability for many common cases and propose them, but 
there hasn't been much point in trying to do anything with it, since that sort 
of thing needs to get passed Andrei (who is likely to say that the current 
solution with find and take is just fine, since it's nicely generic and covers 
all use cases), but he's been busy.

- Jonathan M Davis