Must ranges have value semantics?

[Jesse Phillips via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Tuesday, 15 December 2015 at 17:36:52 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
> I noticed that some methods in Phobos will have very different 
> behavior with forward ranges that have reference semantics and 
> those that have value semantics.
>
> Example:
>
> auto range = getSomeRange();
> auto count = range.walkLength;
> foreach (element; range) { writeln(element); }
>
> If getSomeRange returns a forward range that is a reference 
> type with no .length property, walkLength will exhaust the 
> range. The iteration after that will never enter the loop body.
>
> However, if getSomeRange returns a range with value semantics 
> with no .length property, then iteration is still possible.
>
> I haven't found documentation about how ranges are intended to 
> be used in D written by people who maintain Phobos. Is it 
> normal and expected that I should have to call .save 
> everywhere, manually? Was there discussion on whether this 
> should be the case or a published document containing the 
> reasoning behind the decision?

Unfortunately you must make no assumption about the ranges state 
in generic code after calling a function that takes the range by 
value. If you want to perform other operations after the call to 
walklength, you'll need to have a new range created with save() 
before that call.

The value vs reference rage creates challenges, but in practice 
it will be something you occasionally hit.

I kind of feel like a range should always be taken by reference 
so that it is predictable that the range will be modified if it 
is value or reference semantics.