Making all strings UTF ranges has some risk of WTF

[Ali Çehreli]

bearophile wrote:
 > Time ago you (Andrei) told me that you don't like a function like 
len() to have a different computational complexity, like O(n) or O(1), 
according to the input.

This reminds me of an excellent talk by Matt Austern on STL's 
singly-linked lists.

One of the interesting points of the design was around the length of the 
singly-linked list. In the end, he decides not to provide one.

I think his point was that getting the length of the data structure was 
not one of the main operations of a singly list. I agree that the users 
who really need length can wrap it in a struct that stores the length.

Although there doesn't seem to be a slide dedicated to that point, the 
presentation is here:

   http://www.accu-usa.org/Slides/SinglyLinkedLists.ppt

Ali