How should to!string handle infinite ranges?

[Dukc]

On Tuesday, 4 March 2025 at 10:38:24 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> As a D programmer, which behavior would you find more useful or 
> less surprising?
>
> [1]: https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/10660

Good question.

On the one hand, to!string can be thought as a conversion of any 
type to human-readable format, in which case infinite ranges 
should probably be printed in truncated form as suggested.

On the other hand, a string is an array of characters. If I 
attempt converting a range of characters to an array of 
characters, my first instinct would be to expect a compiler error 
if my range is infinite, as I would when when converting any 
range to an array of the same type.

I tend to think the second interpretation is better in this case. 
`to` is a general purpose conversion function, it's type argument 
can be an array of anything. Therefore when it takes an array of 
characters, it makes sense to treat it like any other array the 
user asks to convert to.

I'm not sure if `to` will actually convert arbitrary ranges to 
arrays like `array` does, but even if that's not the case it's 
how I would expect it to behave _if_ it does - and it does in 
case of a range of characters.