Jonathan M Davis:
I almost never use iota.
Then a problem is in the difference in usage frequency. My first
answer is that you probably should use iota more, because it's
handy in many situations :-)
If I grep my code I count almost 120 usages of iota. I think D
programmers that have some Python experience learn to use iota
quickly, also because the semantics was designed to be the same
as python3 range().
It's useful upon occasion, but in my experience, it's
_far_ more common to iterate over ranges of items rather than
just over a list of numbers.
Iterating on ranges is common, but numbers are items :-)
There are lot of legitimate uses of iota in D code.
One of the tens of legitimate usages of iota() is to replace the
missing enumerate of Phobos, see Issue 5550.
Clearly, you're doing things very differently than I am if you
use iota that much.
I am using ranges (including iota ranges) a lot in D code.
Regardless, I don't think that loss to clarity is worth the
characters saved when providing only one argument to iota.
As I have said, clarity can't be considered ignoring the usage
frequency. Why don't you use "add(,)" instead of "+"? Add or
addition is more clear, but the usage of a symbol is acceptable
here because it's both a very common operation and because
because most people know the meaning of that symbol from math
studies.
Another fact to consider is that functional style D code doesn't
ask for the same compactness as non-functional D code. In
"regular" D code adding few more chars is not a problem. In
functional-style code you usually want to write more compact
code, to keep a logical chunk of code in a line (or in a group of
small lines if you add newlines before the dots). Functional
languages are terse not just for arbitrary reasons, but because
terseness seems to go well with that kind of coding. When you use
iota terseness is more important than "normal" D code.
