On Nov 30, 09 14:02, retard wrote:
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:51:19 +0000, dsimcha wrote:
== Quote from Nick Sabalausky ([email protected])'s article
"retard"<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Hi
after using D1 and Tango for couple of years we decided to experiment
with D2 and Phobos in a small scale project. For some reason the
mostly flat package hierarchy seemed rather confusing.
For instance, it took two of us 15 minutes to build a program that
reads a line from user, converts the string to a natural number, adds
one, and finally prints it to the screen. Entities like 'stdin' seem
to have no documentation at all. What should I import to get it, what
interfaces does it implement etc.
I actually find that kind of ironic, because that's pretty much how I
feel about tango's ultra-separation-mania. I use tango all the time and
I still can't do a single IO operation without spending at least ten
minutes hunting blindly through the docs and finally finding what I
need (including the necessary documentation) is spread out across at
least three different modules.
Yeah, I dislike Tango's (and Java's) I/O design. I think it's a classic
example of overengineering. I don't care how efficient, flexible,
complete, etc. it is if it doesn't "just work" for the simple stuff.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
By
far the two most important pieces of I/O functionality I need are:
1. Read a text file line-by-line.
foreach (line; new Lines!(char) (new File ("foobar.txt")))
Cout (line).newline;
}
yuck.
2. Read a whole file into an array of bytes.
new File("foobar.bin").read()
Java isn't that bad IMO - you just have to remember the buffer:
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("foo"));
try {
String line = null;
while (( line = input.readLine()) != null) {
}
}
finally {
input.close();
}
yuck yuck yuck.
These are common, simple I/O operations that just about everyone needs
fairly often. It's ridiculous if I have to use three different modules
or whatever it takes to accomplish something so simple.
I'm convinced that this is one thing that turns a lot of people off to
programming if they get past the first hurdle of understanding variable
assignment. File I/O is required for almost any program complicated
enough to be worth writing. When a beginner who doesn't necessarily
even understand the concept of a class hierarchy well sees a huge
overengineered API for basic file I/O, he/she is bound to think
(wrongly) that programming is much harder than it really is and that
he/she is just inept at it.
Well, that's not the only problem a novice meets during the first
minutes / hours with a new language. If you write e.g. console apps for
win32, you need to teach them what code pages are, why do you need to
convert between utf-8 and windows-1252 etc. since the default console i/o
routines are not unicode aware under windows.
