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digitalmars.D.bugs - [Issue 4166] New: Remove/deprecate std.string.chop

reply d-bugmail puremagic.com writes:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4166

           Summary: Remove/deprecate std.string.chop
           Product: D
           Version: future
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: Phobos
        AssignedTo: nobody puremagic.com
        ReportedBy: bearophile_hugs eml.cc



Designing good APIs is not easy. A collection of functions like std.string of
Phobos must be large enough to allow all kind of handy operations on strings,
but if it's too much large it gets harder to remember the functions and their
purpose, and to use them the manual can be required, or it takes more time to
remember the right function to use. So there is an optimal number of functions.

And the string functions must be well distinct from each other both in their
purpose and in their name, so there is no risk of ambiguity about what function
to use to solve a string problem while you program quickly.

This is true in general even for normal variable names, too much similar
variable names are a bad programming practice because they can be confused by
programmers that will read you code later.

In std.string there are two functions that are subtly different both in name
and semantics, chomp and chop.

I propose to remove the 'chop' function, that is less useful: if the programmer
wants to remove the trailing newline (a newline coming from readln()) the right
function to use is chomp. This is a common need.

If the programmer wants to remove a fixed amount of chars from the end she/he
can use a length test plus string slicing (the test is necessary because D
slices are unsafe, unlike Python ones).

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next sibling parent d-bugmail puremagic.com writes:
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4166


nfxjfg gmail.com changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |nfxjfg gmail.com



As far as I know, all of std.string is going to be deprecated in favour of
ranges (std.range, std.algorithm).

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prev sibling next sibling parent d-bugmail puremagic.com writes:
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nfxjfg gmail.com changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |INVALID


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prev sibling next sibling parent d-bugmail puremagic.com writes:
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bearophile_hugs eml.cc changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|INVALID                     |



std.string.chomp removes an optionally present trailing newline (that can be
different on different operating systems, one or two chars, there are three
variants of it). I will keep needing chomp functionality in future, and this is
not a job fit for generic ranges/algorithms. So you are wrong.

I think Andrei agrees with me that Phobos2 can keep a std.string that contains
things designed to be fit for strings. Some of such things can be just light
wrappers around algorithms and ranges, but some of them are specific for
strings.

An API for some handy string functions will be necessary still. And such API
will be probably similar to the current one. So this bug report is valid still,
because I think std.string.chop is not good and can be removed.

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prev sibling parent d-bugmail puremagic.com writes:
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Andrei Alexandrescu <andrei metalanguage.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|REOPENED                    |ASSIGNED
                 CC|                            |andrei metalanguage.com
         AssignedTo|nobody puremagic.com        |andrei metalanguage.com


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Jan 09 2011