On Tuesday, 13 February 2018 at 23:35:36 UTC, Seb wrote:
Someone revived the Expressive C++17 Coding Challenge thread
today and I thought this is an excellent opportunity to revive
my blog and finally write an article showing why I like D so
much:
https://seb.wilzba.ch/b/2018/02/the-expressive-c17-coding-challenge-in-d
It's mostly targeted at beginners as I explain many basic D
features, but maybe it's helpful for beginners looking into D.
Great article! Thank you!
Typo: "and finally format bundles" --> "and finally std.format
bundles".
Another typo: "In the latter article I will also present a
solution which only uses 12 lines, but it uses the built-in
std.csv module and I think D doesn’t even need to cheat." should
probably instead start "Later in this article I'll also
present..." or "Further down I'll also present".
But even then, I don't think you should discount or put off using
std.csv as "cheating". I'm guessing std.csv handles things like
quoted elements containing commas. I realize that maybe you're
being pedagogic and wanting to show off D's File byLine and
splitter, but I think the first thing a reader will think when
they see you rolling your own csv reader by hand is that
something must be wrong with D or it's ecosystem if you're
resorting to this, and they'll run for the hills (especially in
an intro article, *and* one in which you point out that the goal
is *expressive* code).
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that, when searching online for
how to read in a csv file for a given language (see many examples
at <http://rosettacode.org/wiki/CSV_data_manipulation>), if the
example involves splitting on commas, I immediately assume it's
either old/incorrect, the language is very low-level only, or
else maybe the language's std lib must be impoverished.
