string is rarely useful as a function argument

[deadalnix]

Le 29/12/2011 07:48, Jonathan M Davis a écrit :
> On Thursday, December 29, 2011 07:33:28 Jakob Ovrum wrote:
>> I don't think this is a problem you can solve without educating
>> people. They will need to know a thing or two about how UTF works
>> to know the performance implications of many of the "safe" ways
>> to handle UTF strings. Further, for much use of Unicode strings
>> in D you can't get away with not knowing anything anyway because
>> D only abstracts up to code points, not graphemes. Imagine trying
>> to explain to the unknowing programmer what is going on when an
>> algorithm function broke his grapheme and he doesn't know the
>> first thing about Unicode.
>>
>> I'm not claiming to be an expert myself, but I believe D offers
>> Unicode the right way as it is.
>
> Ultimately, the programmer _does_ need to understand unicode properly if
> they're going to write code which is both correct and efficient. However, if the
> easy way to use strings in D is correct, even if it's not as efficient as we'd
> like, then at least code will tend to be correct in its use of unicode. And
> then if the programmer wants to their string processing to be more efficient,
> they need to actually learn how unicode works so that they code for it more
> efficiently.
>
> The issue, however, is that it's currently _way_ too easy to use strings
> completely incorrectly and operate on code units as if they were characters. A
> _lot_ of programmers will be using string and char[] as if a char were a
> character, and that's going to create a lot of bugs. Making it harder to
> operate on a char[] or string as if it were an array of characters will
> seriously reduce such bugs and on some level will force people to become
> better educated about unicode.
>
> No, it doesn't completely solve the problem, since then we're operating at the
> code point level rather than the unicode level, but it's still a _lot_ better
> than operating on the code unit level as is likely to happen now.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

That is the whole point of D IMO. I think we shouldn't let an ego 
question dictate language decision.