toString issue

[Derek Parnell]

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:52:44 -0600, Hasan Aljudy wrote:

> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> 
>> How about toUtf8() for classes and structs :-)
>> 
>> Sean
> 
> I think there's a fundamental problem with the way D deals with strings.
> The spec claims that D natively supports strings through char[], at the 
> same time, claims that D fully supports Unicode.
> The fundamental issue is that UTF-8 is one encoding for Unicode strings, 
> but it's not always the best choice. Phobos mostly only deals with 
> char[], and mixing code that uses wchar[] with code that uses char[] 
> isn't very straight forward.
> 
> Consider the simple case of reading a text file and detecting "words". 
> To detect a word, you must first recognize letters, no .. not English 
> letters; letters of any language, and for that purpose, we have 
> isUniAlpha function. Now, If you encode the string as char[], then how 
> are you gonna determine whether or not the next character is a Unicode 
> alpha or not?
> 
> The following definitely shouldn't work:
> //assuming text is char[]
> for( int i = 0; i < text.length; i++ )
> {
>      bool isLetter = isUniAlpha( text[i] );
>      ....
> }

  foreach(int i, dchar c; text)
  {
       bool isLetter = isUniAlpha( c );
       ...
  }


-- 
Derek
(skype: derek.j.parnell)
Melbourne, Australia
"Down with mediocrity!"
2/10/2006 5:10:26 PM