Splitter quiz / survey

[Georg Wrede]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Robert Fraser wrote:
>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>> Jason House wrote:
>>>> Before reading your post, I was going to say that I'd expect 4, would
>>>> accept 1, and consider 2 or 3 to be buggy! Notice how under your new
>>>> proposal everyone would still get the behavior wrong when reading the
>>>> code.
>>>
>>> everyone posting heavily in thiss group != everyone
>>
>> Yes, but it's a representative (albeit small) sample of the user base.
> 
> That I disagree with. I mean... you're just saying it. Participation to 
> a newsgroup is not necessarily correlated with much else than interest 
> and available time. Besides, it's hard to say how representative a 
> sample of 10-15 is.

Of course it isn't representative. Not even necessarily influential. But 
it is /something/. Normally, when we have discussed "new" things, half, 
or even more have been of the [not final] opinion, which has had to have 
been changed. Interestingly, this one was pretty unanimous.

But you're right: participation in a newsgroup, happening to see a 
particular post, and happening to respond to it, before too many others 
find it useless to contribute, can hardly be considered representative. 
And that's precisely why we've had Walter as the Dictator, and lately 
you (for Phobos, at least). Majority lead development is not going to 
lead us anywhere, and I guess we all know it. Grudgingly or not.

Instead of a voting community, the major contribution of this NG migth 
be to bring up unexpected issues with the latest developments (both 
concepts and implementations). Linus Torvalds used to welcome "more 
eyes", under the idea that haystacks shouold get rid of as many needles 
as possible, or else you can't enjoy jumping into them.

> If you said "influential" instead of "representative" then I'd agree 
> you're on to something.
> 
>>> P.S. I scrolled down your post looking for counter-evidence that you 
>>> might have brought, but found only the please-don't-do-this-again 
>>> empty quote. It wastes everybody time looking in vain for nuggets of 
>>> responses within the quoted text.
>>
>> Is consistency a good argument? std.string.split currently does (4). 
>> Java and C#'s split() methods work like (4). strtok does (4). Is there 
>> any other language/function besides Perl that does (2)?
> 
> Yes, Phobos' Splitter :o). Alright, it's not like I'm fixated. I can 
> make the change. I'd be glad to have a stronger criterion for making one 
> choice or another.
> 
> 
> Andrei