string is rarely useful as a function argument

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/30/11 4:01 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/30/2011 11:55 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> Me too. I think the way we have it now is optimal.
>
> Consider your X macro implementation. Strip out the utf.stride code and
> use plain indexing - it will not break the code in any way. The naive
> implementation still works correctly with ASCII and UTF-8.
>
> That's not true for any other multibyte encoding, which is why UTF-8 is
> inspired genius.

It's true for any encoding with the prefix property, such as Huffman.

Using .raw is /optimal/ because it states the assumption appropriately. 
The user knows '$' cannot be in the prefix of any other symbol, so she 
can state the byte alone is the character. If that were a non-ASCII 
character, the assumption wouldn't have worked.

So yeah, UTF-8 is great. But it is not miraculous. We need .raw.


Andrei