TDPL reaches Thermopylae level

[Bill Baxter]

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Pelle Månsson <pelle.mansson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Pelle Månsson <pelle.mansson at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 6:56 AM, Michel Fortin
>>>> <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On 2009-10-27 09:07:06 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
>>>>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:
>>>>>
>>>>>> My current thought is to ascribe lhs ~ rhs the same type as lhs
>>>>>> (thereby
>>>>>> making ~ consistent with ~= by making lhs ~= rhs same as lhs = lhs ~
>>>>>> rhs) in
>>>>>> case lhs is a string type. If lhs is a character type, the result type
>>>>>> is
>>>>>> obviously the same as rhs.
>>>>>
>>>>> Seems the most intuitive option to me. Also, it makes "a ~= b"
>>>>> equivalent
>>>>> to
>>>>> "a = a ~ b" which is always nice.
>>>>
>>>> And that kind of suggests to me that even  a = b  should work.
>>>> It has many of the same characteristics as ~=.  It's pretty
>>>> unambiguous what you'd expect to happen if not an error.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --bb
>>>
>>> int a;
>>> float b = 2.1;
>>> a = b;
>>> also unambiguous?
>>
>> I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but wstring <-> string
>> <-> dstring are all lossless conversions.  That isn't the case with
>> int and float.
>>
>> --bb
>
> They are?
>
> ...Then what is the point of wstring, dstring?

They are all just different representations of Unicode.

string, which is unicode in UTF-8, is good because it's the least
wasteful for mostly ASCII text.  And has a nice ASCII backwards
compatibility story.

dstring, which is unicode in UTF-32, is good because you have one
element = one character.  So it's good for doing substring and other
text manipulations.

wstring, which is UTF-16, is good because it lets you call Windows
Unicode functions.

Here's Daniel Keep's nice explanation:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dtqh79k_1rbxfmb

--bb