My thoughts & experiences with D so far, as a novice D coder

[Vidar Wahlberg]

On Thursday, 28 March 2013 at 22:22:49 UTC, Chris Cain wrote:
> Sorry about the repeated postings ... I'm trying to read & 
> answer it while also dealing with the norovirus :x

Been there. Not amusing, I wish you well.


>> "why is this done like this, couldn't it be done much easier?".
>
> Maybe. What needs to be made easier and how would you suggest 
> to fix it? The error message, certainly. Probably the 
> documentation too. But the API itself seems sane to me in this 
> instance, it just needs a better description.

Well, I'm not so proficient in the language yet that I'm going to 
climb to the top of Mount Stupid and say how it should be, 
because for what I know this may be perfectly logical with just 
me being blind to it, but to try to explain how it would make 
more sense to me:
Since you got "ubyte[] buffer = [0, 0, 0, 0]; 
buffer.write!int(42); buffer.read!int();", I think it would be 
logical that "ubyte[] buffer; buffer.append!int(42); 
buffer.read!int()" would do pretty much the same (except instead 
of writing 4 bytes at index 0, it appends 4 bytes to the end of 
the array, then reads back the value). The latter code does 
however give you "Attempting to fetch the front of an empty array 
of ubyte".
I don't get why you need to drag in std.array.appender() for 
std.bitmanip.append(), when you don't need it for read() and 
write().