On Sunday, 15 March 2015 at 03:26:01 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
Hi.
Some points I think are important follow. I can't do much on
these myself for now as computer use limited by a spinal injury.
That sounds bad. I hope you'll get better!
3. I have said so before (the GroupBy docs) - standard library
documentation is 'perfectly clear' if you have a technical
mindset and are used to reading formalisms, but it is
horrendously intimidating if not (which applies to many
people). We need more examples, and they should put the use in
context rather than just being tiny fragments - ie show how to
do something useful with the function (cf python docs). There
should also be a guide to functions writing from point of what
one wants to achieve. toLower in std.string, but I need to go
to std.ascii for doing the same thing to a character.
Eminently logical, but not obvious if you don't know where to
look.
It seems the accessibility/discoverability of string handling is
a common complaint. People expect certain functions to be
available for strings, like startsWith, trim/ltrim/rtrim, repeat,
maybe even regex matching. Now, these things are all available in
other parts of Phobos, or easily implementable using components
from all over the standard library, but a beginner won't know
this, and even if, it's inconvenient.
Maybe we should add the most common functions to `std.string`?
Either as aliases or re-exports, or even (re)implement them there
with the appropriate semantics if necessary. For example, people
would expect a hypothetical `std.string.repeat` to be eager,
whereas `std.range.repeat("hello").take(5)` is lazy. Some
operations may also decay to ranges of `dchar`, but we'd want to
preserve the string type.
