Strange behavior of iota

[bachmeier]

On Wednesday, 16 February 2022 at 15:21:11 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 February 2022 at 22:24:53 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> [snip]
>>
>> After looking at the documentation and seeing CommonType!(int, 
>> uint) is uint, I have to say that iota's behavior doesn't make 
>> much sense.
>
> What do you propose as an alternative? What about the narrowest 
> type that fits both int and uint? That would be a long.

My preference (in order)

1. Change everything to long. That way it works as anyone other 
than the author of std.range.iota would expect.
2. Throw an error when casting from signed to unsigned. That 
would at least prevent wrong output. The current behavior 
delivers incorrect output 100% of the time, excluding the trivial 
case where the correct output has zero elements.
3. Require the step to be positive.
4. Remove iota from Phobos because it silently changes correct 
code to incorrect code that compiles and runs.