string is rarely useful as a function argument

[Artur Skawina]

On 12/28/11 13:42, bearophile wrote:
> Peter Alexander:
> 
>> I often get into situations where I've written 
>> a function that takes a string, and then I can't call it because all I 
>> have is a char[].
> 
> I suggest you to show some of such situations.
> 
> 
>> I think it's telling that most Phobos functions use 'const(char)[]' or 
>> 'in char[]' instead of 'string' for their arguments. The ones that use 
>> 'string' are usually using it unnecessarily and should be fixed to use 
>> const(char)[].
> 
> What are the Phobos functions that unnecessarily accept a string?

eg things like std.demangle? (which wraps core.demangle and that one accepts const(char)[]). IIRC eg the stdio functions taking file names want strings too; never investigated if they really need this, just .iduped the args...
In general, a lot of things break when trying to switch to "proper" const(char)[] in apps, usually because the app itself used "string" instead of the const version, but fixing it up often also uncovers lib API issues.

artur