standard ranges

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Wed, 27 Jun 2012 13:30:48 -0400, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>  
wrote:


> I don't see why having the literal be a string would make anything  
> confusing.
> The fact that a string is considered a range of dchar rather than char  
> could
> be, but I don't see why having a string literal be a dstring instead of a
> string would help with that. Besides, it's generally expected that  
> you'll use
> string for strings unless you specifically need wstring or dstring for  
> some
> reason.

No, the reason is:

1. T[] is a range of T, unless T == char or T == wchar, and then it's a  
range of dchar (huh?)
2. char[] is not a random access range, even though str[i] and str.length  
work.

The fundamental flaw in the way this works is that phobos is pretending  
immutable(char)[] is not an array.  immutable(char)[] should be an array  
of immutable char, string should be a *separate type* of a range of dchar,  
perhaps with immutable(char)[] as its underlying storage.

D needs a full, library-defined string type.  Until it has that, it's  
going to cause endless confusion and WATs.

-Steve