string is rarely useful as a function argument

[Timon Gehr]

On 12/31/2011 04:30 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, December 30, 2011 20:55:42 Timon Gehr wrote:
>> 1. They don't notice. Then it is not a problem, because they are
>> obviously only using ASCII characters and it is perfectly reasonable to
>> assume that code units and characters are the same thing.
>
> The problem is that what's more likely to happen in a lot of cases is that
> they use it wrong and don't notice, because they're only using ASCII in
> testing, _but_ they have bugs all over the place, because their code is
> actually used with unicode in the field.
>

Then that is the fault of the guy who created the tests. At least that 
guy should be familiar with the issues, otherwise he is at the wrong 
position. Software should never be released without thorough testing.

> Yes, diligent programmers will generally find such problems, but with the
> current scheme, it's _so_ easy to use length when you shouldn't, that it's
> pretty much a guarantee that it's going to happen. I'm not sure that Andrei's
> suggestion is the best one at this point, but I sure wouldn't be against it
> being introduced. It wouldn't entirely fix the problem by any means, but
> programmers would then have to work harder at screwing it up and so there
> would be fewer mistakes.

Programmers would then also have to work harder at doing it right and at 
memoizing special cases, so there is absolutely no net gain.

>
> Arguably, the first issue with D strings is that we have char. In most
> languages, char is supposed to be a character, so many programmers will code
> with that expectation. If we had something like utf8unit, utf16unit, and
> utf32unit (arguably very bad, albeit descriptive, names) and no char, then it
> would force programmers to become semi-educated about the issues. There's no
> way that that's changing at this point though.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

A programmer has to have basic knowledge of the language he is 
programming in. That includes knowing the meaning of all basic types. If 
he fails at that, testing should definitely catch that kind of trivial bugs.