First Impressions

[Georg Wrede]

Lionello Lunesu wrote:
> I also ALWAYS create aliases for char[], wchar[], dchar[]... I DO wish 
> they would be included by default in Phobos.
> 
> alias char[] string;
> alias wchar[] wstring;
> alias dchar[] dstring;
> 
> Perhaps, using string instead of char[], it's more obvious that it's not 
> zero-terminated. I've seen D examples online that just cast a char[] to 
> char* for use in MessageBox and the like (which worked since it were 
> string constants.)

Using char[] as long as you don't know about UTF seems to work pretty 
well in D. But the moment you realise that we're having potential 
multibyte characters in what essentially is a ubyte[], you get scared to 
death, and start to wonder how on earth you haven't yet blown up your 
hard disk.

You start having nightmares about slicing char arrays at the wrong 
place, extracting single chars that might not be storable in a char, and 
all of a sudden you decide to stick with your old language "till things 
calm down".

The only medicine to this is simply to shut your eyes and keep coding on 
like you never did realise anything.

It's a little like when you first realised Daddy isn't holding your 
bike: you instantly fall hurting yourself, instead of realizing that 
he's probably let go ages ago, and you still haven't fallen, so simply 
keep going.

---

This doesn't mean I'm happy with this either, but I don't have the 
energy to conjure up a significantly better solution _and_ fight for it 
till it gets accepted. (Some things are just too hard to fix, like 
"bit=bool" was, and now "auto/auto".)