Text in D article

[Pierre Rouleau]

Pierre Rouleau wrote:

> Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
>> Here's a draft of an article which, hopefully, will explain some of the
>> details of how text in D works.  Any constructive criticism is welcomed,
>> along with edits or corrections.
>>
> 
> As someone who has not been coding in D except for trying out some D 
> every so often, I find:
> 
> - the discussion of Unicode and its support of D clear and useful
> - the description of the use of printf and string confusing:
> 
> You wrote::
> 
>    Back before D had the std.stdio.writefln method, most examples used
>    the old C function printf. This worked fine until you tried to output
>    a string::
> 
>       printf(“Hello, World!\n”);
> 
>    The above statement was very likely to print out garbage that left
>    many people scratching their heads. The reason is that C uses
>    NUL-terminated strings, whereas D uses true arrays. In other words:
> 
>    - Strings in C are a pointer to the first character. A string ends at
>      the first NUL character.
>    - Strings in D are a pointer to the first character, followed by a
>      length. There is no terminating character.
> 
>    And that's the problem: printf is looking for a terminator that
>    doesn't necessarily exist.
> 
> 
> That would lead me to believe that I could not use printf to print a 
> string litteral.  But then I just wrote and compiled the following D code::
> 
>   int
>   main()
>   {
>      printf("Hello!\n");
>      printf("Bye!\n");
>      return 1;
>   }
> 
> But it prints just fine.  So, something must be missing in your 
> explanation or my understanding.  I'll have to read more about D to 
> understand.
> 
> Just my 2 cents,
> 
> -- 
> P.R.
> 
> 

And BTW, the line::

   printf(“Hello, World!\n”);

does not compile because of the non ASCII characters used for quoting.

So other questions comes to mind:

- Can D source code contain Unicode characters freely?
- If so, how is it done?
- If not, how can we define a Unicode string literal?
- Does D have a Unicode string type like, say Python, or is it better at 
specifying them?
- How do we handle internationalization of presentation strings in D?
- gettext support...
- Do we have to use text codecs (as in Python for example)?


This information would fit quite nicely in an article describing text in D.