4-character literal

[Bill Baxter]

Rick Mann wrote:
> Joel C. Salomon Wrote:
> 
>> Rick Mann wrote:
>>> Sadly, nothing's really as nice as just saying 'abcd'. What would it take to get multi-character literals added to the language?
>> In the process of learning to scan C (for a compiler theory class), I 
>> first heard about those.  Seems not-too-useful.  If you want a number, 
>> input the number; if you want a Unicode character, enter L'é‚£' (or 
>> whatever the D equivalent is).  Entering numbers in base 256 is asking 
>> for trouble, especially with UTF-8 source.
> 
> I gotta say, I think they're very useful. Multibyte-character issues aside, it can be a lot handier to see 'abcd' in a debugger than '61626364'. And handling multibyte characters isn't that big a deal...just include all the bytes. If the integer interpretation is 4 bytes, treat it as an uint. If it's more, treat it as a ulong, and issue appropriate warnings/errors when assigning. Pad the values out with zeros. I'm not sure I understand the resistance to the notion.
> 

Probably it's just that most folks rarely ever have a need for such a 
thing.  And in the rare case that we do, the template solution doesn't 
seem so bad.

Besides isn't the value of a multi-character literal going to be 
dependent on the endianness of the machine you're running on?
So you're probably going to want to use it inside a 
version(LittleEndian) {} else {} construct anyway. Might as well tuck 
that away inside the MAKE_ID template.

--bb