standard ranges

[Gor Gyolchanyan]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 10:09 PM, Steven Schveighoffer
<schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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

Agreed. Having struct strings (with slices and everything) will set
the record straight.

-- 
Bye,
Gor Gyolchanyan.