string is rarely useful as a function argument

[Timon Gehr]

On 12/28/2011 08:55 PM, foobar wrote:
> On Wednesday, 28 December 2011 at 19:38:53 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> [snip]
>>>
>>> I'm all for making string a properly encapsulated type.
>>
>> In what way would the proposed change improve encapsulation, and why
>> would it even be desirable for such a basic data structure?
>
> I'm not sure what are you asking here. Are you asking what are the
> benefits of encapsulation?

I know the benefits of encapsulation and none of them applies here. The 
proposed change is nothing but a breaking interface change.

> This topic was discussed to death more than
> once and I'd suggest searching the NG archives for the details. Also, If
> you hadn't already I'd suggest reading about Unicode and its levels of
> abstraction: code point, code units, graphemes, etc...
>

'char' is a code unit. Therefore that is the level of abstraction the 
data type char[] provides.