What's left for 1.0?

[Bill Baxter]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Daniel Keep wrote:
>> Also, I think this whole discussion is highlighting a misunderstanding
>> on how strings work in D.  Some people seem to be looking at D's string
>> support and thinking "Oh, it looks just like a scripting language, so
>> <X> should work the same; what the?!  It doesn't?!  Must be broken!"
>> They don't seem to understand *why* we have char, wchar and dchar.  I
>> think it's time we had an article either in a D manual (do we even,
>> strictly speaking, HAVE a manual for D?[1]) or somewhere on the website
>> so we can say:
>>
>>   "No, it's not broken; it's just different.  Go here and all shall
>> become clear."
> 
> Yes, I think you're right. Once one has a good handle on what UTF-8 is 
> (and UTF-16 and UCS-4), it all makes sense. D provides several different 
> ways of looking at characters (and strings) and none of them are quite 
> like C++ (which essentially has no support for international characters) 
> or like scripting languages (which hide all the details, making them 
> inefficient).

> I've thought more than once about writing an article about it, but got 
> distracted by other things.

I would like to try to use dchar[] as my standard string type, however 
it doesn't seem to be supported as well by the compiler and library as 
char[] is.  For instance std.string has basically nothing for dchar[]s.

And there doesn't seem to be a dchar string literal syntax.  At least I 
couldn't find it.  The section on StringLiterals linked to from the 
expressions page is non-existant.

--bb