[phobos] std.array.ilength

[Don Clugston]

On 17 February 2011 14:59, David Simcha <dsimcha at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> Kagamin just came up with a simple but great idea to mitigate the pedantic
> nature of 64-bit to 32-bit integer conversions in cases where using size_t
> doesn't cut it.  Examples are storing arrays of indices into other arrays,
> where using size_t would be a colossal waste of space if it's safe to assume
> none of the arrays will be billions of elements long.
>
> int ilength(T)(T[] arr) {
>    assert(arr.length <= int.max);
>    return cast(int) arr.length;
> }
>
> Usage:
>
> int[] indices;
> auto array = returnsArray();
> indices ~= array.ilength;
>
> This cuts down on the excessive verbosity of an explicit cast that's safe
> 99.999 % of the time and encourages sprinkling it into code even if for the
> foreseeable future it will be compiled in 32-bit mode.
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1.  Is everyone ok with me adding this as a convenience function to
> std.array?
> 2.  int or uint?  I used int only b/c that was the example on the newsgroup,
> but I think uint makes more sense.

I *strongly* oppose uint. We should take every possible opportunity to
reduce usage of unsigned numbers.
'i' implies immutable.
How about intlength  (or intLength ?)