First Impressions

[Sean Kelly]

Walter Bright wrote:
> 
> Contrast that with C++, which has no usable or portable support for 
> UTF-8, UTF-16, or any Unicode. All your carefully coded use of 
> std::string needs to be totally scrapped and redone with your own custom 
> classes, should you decide your app needs to support unicode.

As long as you're aware that you are working in UTF-8 I think 
std::string could still be used.  It just may be strange to use 
substring searches to find multibyte characters with no built-in support 
for dchar-type searching.

> You can also wrap char[] inside a class that provides a view of the data 
>  as if it were dchar's. But I don't think the performance of such a 
> class would be competitive. Interestingly, it turns out that most string 
> operations do not need to be concerned with the number of char's in a 
> character (like "find this substring"), and forcing them to care just 
> makes for inefficiency.

Yup.  I realized this while working on array operations and it came as a 
surprise--when I began I figured I would have to provide overloads for 
char strings, but in most cases it simply isn't necessary.


Sean