Why the hell doesn't foreach decode strings

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-10-20 23:49, Peter Alexander wrote:
> On 20/10/11 8:37 PM, Martin Nowak wrote:
>> It just took me over one hour to find out the unthinkable.
>> foreach(c; str) will deduce c to immutable(char) and doesn't care about
>> unicode.
>> Now there is so many unicode transcoding happening in the language that
>> it starts to get annoying,
>> but the most basic string iteration doesn't support it by default?
>
> D has got itself into a tricky situation in this regard. Doing it either
> way introduces an unintuitive mess.
>
> The way it is now, you get the problem that you just described where
> foreach is unaware of Unicode.
>
> If you changed it to loop as Unicode, then indices won't match up:
>
> immutable(int)[] a = ...
> foreach (x, i; a)
> assert(x == a[i]); // ok
>
> immutable(char)[] b = ...
> foreach (x, i; b)
> assert(x == b[i]); // not necessarily!

The index could skip certain indexes to make that assert pass. But that 
would be confusing as well.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg