VLERange: a range in between BidirectionalRange and RandomAccessRange

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/18/11 9:46 PM, Steven Wawryk wrote:
> On 19/01/11 13:53, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> My response of Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:58:43 -0600 was a fair attempt at a
>> response. If you found that dismissive, I'd be hard pressed to improve
>> it. To quote myself:
>>
>>> I believe the proposed scheme:
>>>
>>> 1. Changes the language in a major way;
>>>
>>> 2. Is highly disruptive;
>>>
>>> 3. Improves the status quo in only minor ways.
>>>
>>> I'd be much more willing to improve things by e.g. defining the
>>> representation() function I talked about a bit ago, and other less
>>> disruptive additions.
>>
>> That took into consideration your amendments.
>
> I don't think that it did. I proposed no language change, nor anything
> disruptive.

Adding a new string type would be disruptive. Unless I misunderstood, 
there is still a new string type in Steve's proposal, and one that would 
be the default one, even after the amendments you mentioned. That is a 
problem because people write this:

auto s = "hello";

and the question is, what is the type of s.

  The change in status quo I proposed was essentially the same
> one you encouraged here, about a type that gives the user the choice of
> what kind of range to be operated on. It appears to me that you were
> responding to some perception you had about Steve's full proposal (that
> may have been triggered by something I said in the introduction), not
> what I actually said in the content.

If that's what it is, great. To clarify: no new string type, only a 
range that iterates one grapheme over existing strings.

> So, I would still be interested to know how to sound out this newsgroup
> with an idea (before coding commitment) and have the suggestions
> considered on something more than a superficial level.
>
> Is the newsgroup too busy? Should there be people nominated to screen
> ideas that are worth looking at? Should I use a completely different
> approach? Your suggestions so far I will take into account, but it still
> looks like there's a barrier to me.

My perception is that you want to minimize risks before starting to 
invest work into this. I'm not sure how you can do that.

Andrei