First Impressions!

[docandrew]

On Tuesday, 28 November 2017 at 03:01:33 UTC, A Guy With an 
Opinion wrote:
>
> - ...however, where are all of the collections? No Queue? No 
> Stack? No HashTable? I've read that it's not a big focus 
> because some of the built in stuff *can* behave like those 
> things. The C# project I'm porting utilizes queues and a 
> specifically C#'s Dictionary<> quite a bit, so I'm not looking 
> forward to having to hand roll my own or use something that 
> aren't fundamentally them. This is definitely the biggest 
> negative I've come across. I want a queue, not something that 
> *can* behave as a queue. I definitely expected more from a 
> language that is this old.
>

Good feedback overall, thanks for checking it out. You're not 
wrong, but some of the design decisions that feel strange to 
newcomers at first have been heavily-debated, generally 
well-reasoned, and just take some time to get used to. That 
sounds like a cop-out, but stick with it and I think you'll find 
that a lot of the decisions make sense - see the extensive 
discussion on NaN-default for floats, for example.

Just one note about the above comment though: the 
std.container.dlist doubly-linked list has methods that you can 
use to put together stacks and queues easily:

https://dlang.org/phobos/std_container_dlist.html

Also, D's associative arrays implement a hash map 
https://dlang.org/spec/hash-map.html, which I think should take 
care of most of C#'s Dictionary functionality.

Anyhow, D is a big language (for better and sometimes worse), so 
it's easy to miss some of the good nuggets buried within the 
spec/library.

-Doc