Why ElementType!(char[3]) == dchar instead of char?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Tuesday, September 01, 2015 20:05:18 drug via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> My case is I don't know what type user will be using, because I write a
> library. What's the best way to process char[..] in this case?

char[] should never be anything other than UTF-8. Similarly, wchar[] is
UTF-16, and dchar[] is UTF-32. So, if you're getting something other than
UTF-8, it should not be char[]. It should be something more like ubyte[].
If you want to operate on it as char[], you should convert it to UTF-8.
std.encoding may or may not help with that. But pretty much everything in D
- certainly in the standard library - assumes that char, wchar, and dchar
are UTF-encoded, and the language spec basically defines them that way.
Technically, you _can_ put other encodings in them, but it's just asking for
trouble.

- Jonathan M Davis