Why Strings as Classes?

[Benji Smith]

BCS wrote:
> Reply to Benji,
> 
>> BCS wrote:
>>
>>> Ditto, D is a *systems language* It's *supposed* to have access to
>>> the lowest level representation and build stuff on top of that
>>>
>> But in this "systems language", it's a O(n) operation to get the nth
>> character from a string, to slice a string based on character offsets,
>> or to determine the number of characters in the string.
>>
>> I'd gladly pay the price of a single interface vtable lookup to turn
>> all of those into O(1) operations.
>>
>> --benji
>>
> 
> Then borrow, buy, steal or build a class that does that /on top of the D 
> arrays/
> 
> No one has said that this should not be available, just that it should 
> not /replace/ what is available

The point is that the new string class would be incompatible with the 
*hundreds* of existing functions that process character arrays.

Why don't strings qualify for polymorphism?

Am I the only one who thinks the existing tradeoff is a fool's bargain?

--benji