On Monday, 25 June 2012 at 17:26:23 UTC, Mehrdad wrote:
I feel like isInfinite is useless for typical cases... the only
"infinite" (perhaps I should call it "unbounded" instead?)
range I've ever realistically come across is a stream, like
console input or a network stream.
Of course, isInfinite doesn't make any sense for any type of
wrapper around console input -- is it true or false?
You can't tell, because it depends on whether the input is
redirected.
If the console input was redirected, then it would be finite,
with a certain length (the length of the file).
If not, then it would be infinite (er, unbounded).
So IMHO, we should deprecate isInfinite entirely, and instead
rely on length being size_t.max.
Not only would it make more sense, but it would make it
possible to create a random-access wrapper around an input
range (like console input), which lazily fetches its data.
Then you can work with console input like a regular string!
This also prompts another issue:
The length of a range should be a long, not size_t.
Otherwise there's no way we could possibly replace streams with
ranges. 32-bit systems have LOTS of common streams that are over
2^32 bytes (e.g. DVD images, partition images, large movies,
etc.).
