Selectable encodings

[Mike Capp]

In article <e12j34$2gi2$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, John C says...
>
>version (utf8) alias mlchar char;

Apologies for going off at a tangent to your question, but I've never quite
understood what D thinks it's doing here. If char[] is an array of characters,
then it can't be a UTF-8 string, because UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding. So
is char[] an array of characters from some other charset (e.g. the subset of
UTF-8 representable in one byte), or is it an array of bytes encoding a UTF-8
string (in which case I suspect quite a lot of string-handling code is badly
broken)?

cheers
Mike