On 2012-09-17 18:34, monarch_dodra wrote:
I love D's concept of arrays (fat pointers).However, one thing I've found it lacks is a (convenient) way to get the end ptr. Phobos (and druntime) are riddled with "arr.ptr + arr.length". It is ugly and inconvenient, and makes something that should be easy to understand that much harder. Then I thought: "std.array" defines all the functions required to enhance arrays. Why not just add a "ptrEnd" in there? So I did. The rational is that now, we can write: bool isDisjoint = a.ptrEnd <= b.ptr || b.ptrEnd <= a.ptr; More elegant than: bool isDisjoint = a.ptr + a.length <= b.ptr || b.ptr + b.length <= a.ptr; Nothing revolutionary, but it *is* easier on the fingers when typing :D . Also, it *does* make a change in some bigger and more complicated cases. Anyways, pull request: https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/798 I wanted to have some feedback, as this is introducing something new (as opposed to fixing something existing). IMO, this should really be built-in, in particular, since, in my understanding, an array is internally represented by the ptr and ptrEnd pair anyways. If the compiler has access to it, it might as well communicate it (rather than us re-calculating it...)
Rather than adding new language features we're moving stuff out of the core language and into the runtime/standard library. This is a perfect example of a library function. Since we have UFCS it would behave and look exactly the same as if it was a built-in property on arrays. If this is added to the "object" module in druntime you wouldn't even need to import anything.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
