First Impressions

[BCS]

Johan Granberg wrote:
> 
> 
> I completely agree, char should hold a character independently of 
> encoding and NOT a code unit or something else. I think it would be
> beneficial to D in the long term if chars where done right (meaning that 
> they can store any character) how it is implemented is not important and 
> i believe performance is not a problem here, so ease of use and 
> correctness would be appreciated.

Why isn't performance a problem?

If you are saying that this won't cause performance hits in run times or 
  memory space, I might be able to buy it, but I'm not yet convinced.

If you are saying that causing a performance hit in run times or memory 
space is not a problem... in that case I think you are dead wrong and 
you will not convince me otherwise.

In my opinion, any compiled language should allow fairly direct access 
to the most efficient practical means of doing something*. If I didn't 
care about speed and memory I wound use some sort of scripting language.

A good set of libs should make most of this moot. Leave the char as is 
and define a typedef struct or whatever that provides the added 
functionality that you want.

* OTOH a language should not mandate code to be efficient at the expense 
of ease of coding.