Idea: Introduce zero-terminated string specifier

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 02 Oct 2012 04:09:43 -0400, Walter Bright  
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 10/1/2012 7:22 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> Does it make sense for Phobos to provide such a shortcut in an obscure
>> header somewhere? Like std.cstring? Or should we just say "roll your own
>> if you need it"?
>
> As a matter of principle, I really don't like gobs of Phobos functions  
> that are literally one liners. Phobos should not become a mile wide but  
> inch deep library of trivia. It should consist of non-trivial, useful,  
> and relatively deep functions.

This, arguably, is one of the most important aspects of C to support.   
There are lots of C functions which provide C strings.  Yes, we don't want  
to promote using C strings, but to have one point of conversion so you  
*can* use safe strings is a good thing.  In other words, the sooner you  
convert your zero-terminated strings to char slices, the better off you  
are.  And if we label it system code, it can't be misused in @safe code.

Why support zero-terminated strings as literals if it wasn't important?   
You could argue that things like system calls which return zero-terminated  
strings are as safe to use as string literals which you know have zero  
terminated values.

The only other alternative is to wrap those C functions with D ones that  
convert to char[].  I don't find this any more appealing.

-Steve