On Friday, 10 May 2024 at 00:40:01 UTC, Meta wrote:
Yes. The reason for this is that it avoids having to essentially do the same check twice. If `in` returned a bool instead of a pointer, after checking for whether the element exists (which requires searching for the element in the associative array), you'd then have to actually *get* it from the array, which would require searching again. Returning a pointer to the element if it exists (or `null` if it doesn't) cuts this down to 1 operation.
Looking at Programming in D section 28.5, I'm guessing that pointer versus null is treated as the appropriate boolean value when consumed by an "if" test. So that example is getting a pointer to a string, or null, but the example looks exactly as the same as if it had directly gotten a bool.
Thank you! Andy
