On 26-Oct-2015 18:15, Andrei Alexandrescu via phobos wrote:
Hi folks, isStringLike is a fine idea but there are a number of issues I noticed while looking at the PR and the related pieces it works with.
[snip]
I think a string-like structure is: (a) an array of characters or a subtype thereof(b) some other forward range with ElementType some character type, and potentially ElementEncodingType a different character type as well.
Sadly the main reason for isStringLike is (c) alias this to something that has a or b defined above.
That's pretty much it. Algorithms dealing with string-like data should be able to work with this definition, or temporarily convert to arrays of characters.More importantly, while looking at https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/phobos/pull/3770/ and related work I can't stop noticing a growth of layers of complexity that seems poorly scalable, instead of an increase in generic simplicity and clarity of concepts. That does not bode well and we need to curb it lest we end up with a standard library we ourselves can't make sense of.I do understand there are issues to fix and we need to move forward. But tactical solutions cannot substitute a lack of strategy.Please let us all stop and draw a little breath, and figure out how to replace the monumental work in PR 3770 with simplifying abstractions. Once something like isStringLike becomes part of Phobos, we're stuck with it for eternity - there's no way we can fix it without breaking code.
Release is unavoidable. Let us ship it then figure out the optimal string like definition. The whole auto-decoding mess together with alias this mess is important to solve but must not prevent us from releasing on time.
Thanks, Andrei _______________________________________________ phobos mailing list phobos@puremagic.com http://lists.puremagic.com/mailman/listinfo/phobos
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