string is rarely useful as a function argument
Vladimir Panteleev
vladimir at thecybershadow.net
Thu Dec 29 00:04:46 PST 2011
On Wednesday, 28 December 2011 at 19:00:53 UTC, Andrei
Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/28/11 12:46 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 12/28/2011 10:35 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
>>> On 28/12/11 6:15 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> If such a change is made, then people will use const string
>>>> when they
>>>> mean immutable, and the values underneath are not guaranteed
>>>> to be
>>>> consistent.
>>>
>>> Then people should learn what const and immutable mean!
>>>
>>> I don't think it's fair to dismiss my suggestion on the
>>> grounds that
>>> people
>>> don't understand the language.
>>
>> People do what is convenient, and as endless experience shows,
>> doing the
>> right thing should be easier than doing the wrong thing. If
>> you present
>> people with a choice:
>>
>> #1: string s;
>> #2: immutable(char)[] s;
>>
>> sure as the sun rises, they will type the former, and it will
>> be subtly
>> incorrect if string is const(char)[].
>>
>> Telling people they should know better and pick #2 instead is
>> a strategy
>> that never works very well - not for programming, nor any
>> other endeavor.
>
> Oh, one more thing - one good thing that could come out of this
> thread is abolition (through however slow a deprecation path)
> of s.length and s[i] for narrow strings. Requiring s.rep.length
> instead of s.length and s.rep[i] instead of s[i] would improve
> the quality of narrow strings tremendously. Also, s.rep[i]
> should return ubyte/ushort, not char/wchar. Then, people would
> access the decoding routines on the needed occasions, or would
> consciously use the representation.
I think it would be simpler to just make dstring the default
string type.
dstring is simple and safe. People who want better memory usage
can use UTF-8 at their own discretion.
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