Re: std.compress

[Timothee Cour]

On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 11:37 AM, Walter Bright
<newshou...@digitalmars.com>wrote:

> On 6/4/2013 11:04 AM, John Colvin wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, 4 June 2013 at 17:50:47 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>>> What value does a function which just passes an alias to another one add?
>>>
>>
>> A unified interface called "compress" that takes a compression function
>> as an
>> alias (with e.g. lzwCompress as a default) seems like a nicer way of
>> working,
>> seeing as people don't necessarily care/know about which algorithm they're
>> using, they just want to compress something a bit.
>>
>> Also, it would be cool if a range could remember which algorithm it was
>> compressed with (as it's type? I.e. LzwRange), so a generic function
>> "expand"
>> could call the appropriate ***Expand
>>
>
> What is the improvement of typing:
>
>    compress(lzw)
>
> over:
>
>    lzwCompress()
>
> ?
>

writing generic code.
same reason as why we prefer:
auto y=to!double(x) over auto y=to_double(x);