On 2010-01-01 09:47:58 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> said:
Upon more thinking, I'm leaning the other way. ~= is a quirk of arrays
motivated by practical necessity. I don't want to propagate that quirk
into ranges. The best output range is one that works properly when
passed by value.
I agree and disagree. I wasn't proposing that ranges support ~=, and I
don't thing it'd be a good idea, so I agree with you here.
But I still believe output ranges should behave like arrays. I was
proposing that you model output ranges after buffers. A stream then
becomes a buffer of infinite length.
Look at this example:
char[10] buffer;
char[] remainingSpace = buffer[];
while (!remainingSpace.empty)
remainingSpace.put(getc());
// now buffer is full
writeln(buffer);
Now rename "remainingSpace" for "outputStream" and it works fine,
except for two things: "empty" sounds strange, and an output stream is
never empty of remaining space: it's infinite length.
But conceptually, a buffer and a stream are almost the same, one having
finite capacity while the other is infinite.
--
Michel Fortin
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
