Why is string.front dchar?

[Maxim Fomin]

On Monday, 13 January 2014 at 23:10:04 UTC, TheFlyingFiddle wrote:
> I'm curious, why is the .front property of narrow strings of 
> type dchar?
> And not the underlying character type for the string.

The root of the issue is that string literals containing 
characters which do not fit into signle byte are still converted 
to char[] array. This is strictly speaking not type safe because 
it allows to reinterpret 2 or 4 byte code unit as sequence of 
characters of 1 byte size. The string type is in some sense 
problematic in D. That's why the fact that .front returns dhcar 
is a way to correct the problem, it is not an attempt to 
introduce confusion.