standard ranges

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Thu Jun 28 05:28:06 PDT 2012


On 6/28/12 5:28 AM, Christophe Travert wrote:
> As a more general comment, I think having a consistent langage is a very
> important goal to achieve when designing a langage. It makes everything
> simpler, from langage design to user through compiler and library
> development. It may not be too late for D.

In a way it's too late for any language in actual use. The "fog of 
language design" makes it nigh impossible to design a language/library 
combo that is perfectly consistent, not to mention the fact that 
consistency itself has many dimensions, some of which may be in competition.

We'd probably do things a bit differently if we started from scratch. As 
things are, D's strings have a couple of quirks but are very apt for 
good and efficient string manipulation where index computation in the 
code unit realm is combined with the range of code points realm. I 
suppose people who have an understanding of UTF don't have difficulty 
using D's strings. Above all, alea jacta est and there's little we can 
do about that save for inventing a time machine.


Andrei



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