DUB RC 0.9.24-rc.1 ready for testing

[notna via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 21 July 2015 at 15:36:56 UTC, wobbles wrote:
> On Tuesday, 21 July 2015 at 14:59:21 UTC, notna wrote:
> [...snip...]
>> - make D2 easy2use for "not C++/Java/whatever gurus" again
>>   -> all this different "types", which are either required as 
>> an input for functions or are returned from those and need to 
>> be casted/converted all the time... frustrating for real "new 
>> comers"
> [...snip...]
>
> Huh? Whats frustrating about it?
> It's a statically typed language, there's always going to be 
> "types".
> We have the 'auto' keyword for type inference though, which 
> really makes it feel like a scripting language.
> Honestly, the biggest advice I can give to real new-comers is 
> to use auto for a while till you get a feel for it.

I think you miss the point... maybe my confusing wording...

"auto" is fantastic, no doubt, but already not always 
usable/working. I think there are plenty ppl out there, who want 
to be sure what will be returned and prefer to specify the return 
type they want/expect. And yes, again, I also like and use 
"auto", as it can make life easy... or not... but only if I know 
what will be returned or I just don't care (like for "write" and 
friends) ;) And "auto" is a good example that auto-conversions 
enhance the user experience, exactly what i want and try to 
suggest/explain here...

What I say is, we should try to make the usage of "string" and 
friends a comfortable no-brainer for all functions and by this 
minimize the "cast|convert hell" by either having always all 
functions accepting and returning basic types like [dw]char, 
[dw]char[], string... or at least forcing the different range 
types to do so. Just remember, most of the data out there is 
still lines, strings, words and/or just a bunch of chars ;)

What i mean with the "cast|convert hell".. Just go to the Phobos 
modules and check out how many casts|conversions are there... or 
search the forum.dlang.org for threads which include the 
suggestion to use the UFCS".array" hack ;) and so on...

example:
    $ egrep -w 
"to\!char|to\!\(char|to\!string|to\!\(string|cast\(char|cast\(string" -c datetime.d
43

or more general:

    $ egrep -w 'to!|cast' -c *.d
    array.d:52
    ascii.d:9
    base64.d:47
    bigint.d:14
    bitmanip.d:66
    compiler.d:0
    complex.d:1
    concurrency.d:15
    conv.d:176
    cstream.d:8
    csv.d:6
    datetime.d:250
    demangle.d:4
    encoding.d:105
    exception.d:29
    file.d:21
    format.d:125
    functional.d:13
    getopt.d:7
    json.d:2
    math.d:142
    mathspecial.d:0
    metastrings.d:0
    mmfile.d:31
    numeric.d:40
    outbuffer.d:22
    parallelism.d:34
    path.d:19
    process.d:24
    random.d:31
    signals.d:3
    socket.d:85
    socketstream.d:4
    stdint.d:0
    stdio.d:79
    stdiobase.d:0
    stream.d:72
    string.d:98
    syserror.d:1
    system.d:0
    traits.d:3
    typecons.d:65
    typelist.d:0
    typetuple.d:1
    uni.d:79
    uri.d:27
    utf.d:146
    uuid.d:35
    variant.d:57
    xml.d:42
    zip.d:44
    zlib.d:28

I hope it's clearer now what I was trying to say before :O