First Impressions

[Walter Bright]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> 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.

It's so broken that there are proposals to reengineer core C++ to add 
support for UTF types.

1) implementation-defined whether a char is signed or unsigned, so 
you've got to cast the result of any string[i]

2) none of the iteration, insertion, appending, etc., operations can 
handle multibyte

3) no UTF conversion or transliteration

4) C++ source text encoding is implementation-defined, so no using UTF 
characters in source code (have to use \u or \U notation)