Getting the const-correctness of Object sorted once and for all

[Walter Bright]

On 5/13/2012 12:57 PM, Era Scarecrow wrote:
> On Sunday, 13 May 2012 at 19:43:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 5/13/2012 9:39 AM, Stewart Gordon wrote:
>>> It seems that the main obstacle is rewriting the relevant methods in
>>> std.stream. The current implementation doesn't make sense anyway - reading
>>> the entire contents of a file is certainly not the way to generate a hash or
>>> string representation of the stream. I'm thinking the hash should probably be
>>> the stream handle, and the string representation could perhaps be the full
>>> pathname of the file. Of course, what it should be for non-file streams is
>>> another matter. (This would be a change at the API level, but when the API's
>>> as fundamentally flawed as this....)
>>
>> I'd like to see std.stream dumped. I don't see any reason for it to exist that
>> std.stdio doesn't do (or should do).
>>
>> The only reason it's there at the moment is for backwards compatibility.
>
> Recently in my own code I've started making use of std.stream, mostly creating
> temporary string streams to test IO in functions that would otherwise need
> actual files for unittests.

I suggest switching over to a range interface. Then, your code need not care if 
it is getting input from files, arrays, or any containers. Same for output. That 
means you can use arrays to unittest it, or write your own mock input/output ranges.


> Glancing over std.stdio, I only see specific file access functions and routines.
> If I'm doing the wrong approach please correct me now.

std.stdio's support for ranges needs some improvement.