On Sunday, 13 May 2012 at 10:08:47 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
assumeSorted(range).contains(object)
is still one line, safer, and IMHO more self-explanatory.
It's self-explanatory if the name there contains something like
"binarySearch". Otherwise it is NOT self-explanatory, I can't
assume it will use a binary search.
So it's surely not intuitive.
Bye,
bearophile
100% agree with this.
How anyone can possibly think that using
assumeSorted(r).contains(x) to do a binary search is more
self-explanatory than just writing binarySearch(r, x) is beyond
me. It's mind-boggling.
We have proof that it is not intuitive: the fact that people
frequently ask how to do a binary search in std.algorithm. If it
was intuitive, they wouldn't need to ask. If it was
self-explanatory, it wouldn't need to be explicitly mentioned in
the documentation. Needing documentation is precisely the
opposite of self-explanatory.
Andrei, you are a reasonable person. What evidence would it take
to convince you that this design for doing binary searches is bad?
