Either I'm just too stupid, or D is lacking something

[Frits van Bommel]

Chris Nicholson-Sauls wrote:
> The '$' is currently used as an alias to the '.length' property of 
> arrays, available only as a right-hand-side to the range sub-op in the 
> slice-op.
> array[0 .. $] == array[0 .. array.length]

Actually, it also works perfectly fine in the left sub-op in the slice-op:

     import std.stdio;

     void main()
     {
         char[] a = "Hello world!";
         char[] b = a[$-6 .. $-1];
         writefln(b);
     }

prints "world" to stdout, no problem :).