VLERange: a range in between BidirectionalRange and RandomAccessRange

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/15/11 10:47 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:
> On 2011-01-15 22:25:47 -0500, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> said:
>
>> The issue of foreach remains, but without being willing to change what
>> foreach defaults to, you can't really fix it - though I'd suggest that
>> we at least make it a warning to iterate over strings without
>> specifying the type. And if foreach were made to understand Grapheme
>> like it understands dchar, then you could do
>>
>> foreach(Grapheme g; str) { ... }
>>
>> and have the compiler warn about
>>
>> foreach(g; str) { ... }
>>
>> and tell you to use Grapheme if you want to be comparing actual
>> characters.
>
> Walter's argument against changing this for foreach was that it'd
> *silently* break compatibility with existing D1 code. Changing the
> default to a grapheme makes this argument obsolete: since a grapheme is
> essentially a string, you can't compare it with char or wchar or dchar
> directly, so it'll break at compile time with an error and you'll have
> to decide what to do.
>
> So Walter would have to find another argument to defend the status quo.

I think it's poor abstraction to represent a Grapheme as a string. It 
should be its own type.

Andrei