string is rarely useful as a function argument

[Timon Gehr]

On 01/01/2012 04:13 PM, Chad J wrote:
> On 01/01/2012 07:59 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 01/01/2012 05:53 AM, Chad J wrote:
>>>
>>> If you haven't been educated about unicode or how D handles it, you
>>> might write this:
>>>
>>> char[] str;
>>> ... load str ...
>>> for ( int i = 0; i<   str.length; i++ )
>>> {
>>>       font.render(str[i]); // Ewww.
>>>       ...
>>> }
>>>
>>
>> That actually looks like a bug that might happen in real world code.
>> What is the signature of font.render?
>
> In my mind it's defined something like this:
>
> class Font
> {
>   ...
>
>      /** Render the given code point at
>          the current (x,y) cursor position. */
>      void render( dchar c )
>      {
>          ...
>      }
> }
>
> (Of course I don't know minute details like where the "cursor position"
> comes from, but I figure it doesn't matter.)
>
> I probably wrote some code like that loop a very long time ago, but I
> probably don't have that code around anymore, or at least not easily
> findable.

I think the main issue here is that char implicitly converts to dchar: 
This is an implicit reinterpret-cast that is nonsensical if the 
character is outside the ascii-range.