On Saturday 11 September 2010 13:54:19 Cavalary wrote: > Hm, to me "informatics" made sense :) Not sure if I ever heard it > used in English, but it sounds more suitable than "computer > science", which (no matter how it's officially used) sounds like > it would include everything that deals with computers, so hardware > as well.
Informatics is essentially the term used in at least some European languages other than English. Personally, I think that the name is no better - if not worse - than computer science, since it implies that it has to do with the study of information, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with computers, math, or logic. Apparently the term is already taken by more or less that anyway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics_(academic_field) . But I've never heard a term which really properly captured what computer science / informatics is. All candidates have problems of one sort or another. In any case, I was just pointing out to Bearophile that the official English term is computer science so that he's better able to communicate in English (from this and other posts, I gather that English is not his first language, though he's definitely fluent). What the best term would technically be really isn't of consequence, since it's not like we really get to pick at this point. > And thanks again. Haven't seen readln() used in any of the > examples I glanced over, so would have had no idea about it > otherwise... The examples on D's site are generally both sparse and old. Many of the projects on dsource are either D1 and/or old, so it's not a great place to look for examples either. The reality of the matter at this point is that you're going to have to read through the Phobos docs if you want to find all of the functions which could be useful to you. Also, I think that many of the examples in the language documentation in particular (rather than the Phobos docs) are more likely to be C in style rather than taking advantage of more idiomatic D stuff like ranges. My guess is that that's because a fair bit of it was done by Walter rather than Andrei. In any case, good examples of D code are rather lacking at this point, so you'll have to explore the Phobos docs yourself and pay attention to what people post. For that matter, you could dive in the Phobos code and have a look there. std.range and std.algorithm are probably particularly good to look at - though neither would really help you with I/O. However, Andrei's recently published book "The D Programming Language" (typically referred to as TDPL around here) is a fantastic source for learning about D. So, if you haven't picked that up yet, I highly recommend it. It's the best introductory book to a programming language that I've ever read (probably in part because it doesn't assume that you've never programmed in your life and have no clue what basic stuff like variables or if statements are - it does explain how they work in D though). Howeve, t does mean shelling out around $40, so whether it's worth it depends on how serious you are about learning and using D. - Jonathan M Davis
