tolf and detab

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 08/07/2010 11:16 PM, bearophile wrote:
> Jonathan M Davis:
>> I would have thought that being more idomatic would have resulted
>> in slower code than what Walter did, but interestingly enough, both
>> programs are faster with my code. They might take more memory
>> though. I'm not quite sure how to check that. In any cases, you
>> wanted some idiomatic D2 solutions, so there you go.
>
> Your code looks better.
>
> My (probably controversial) opinion on this is that the idiomatic D
> solution for those text "scripts" is to use a scripting language, as
> Python :-)
>
> In this case a Python version is more readable, shorter and probably
> faster too because reading the lines of a _normal_ text file is
> faster in Python compared to D (because Python is more optimized for
> such purposes. I can show benchmarks on request).
>
> On the other hand D2 is in its debugging phase, so it's good to use
> it even for purposes it's not the best language for, to catch bugs or
> performance bugs. So I think it's positive to write such scripts in
> D2, even if in a real-world setting I want to use Python to write
> them.

I think it's worth targeting D2 to tasks that are usually handled by 
scripting languages. I've done a lot of that and it beats the hell out 
of rewriting in D a script that's grown out of control

Andrei