Idea: Introduce zero-terminated string specifier

[Andrej Mitrovic]

On 10/2/12, Walter Bright <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> On 9/30/2012 11:31 AM, deadalnix wrote:
>> If you know that a string is 0 terminated, you can easily create a slice
>> from it as follow :
>>
>> char* myZeroTerminatedString;
>> char[] myZeroTerminatedString[0 .. strlen(myZeroTerminatedString)];
> Since %zs is inherently unsafe, it
> hides such unsafety in a commonly used library function, which will
> infect everything else that transitively calls writefln with unsafety.
>
> This makes %zs an unacceptable feature.

How does it hide anything if you have to explicitly mark the format
specifier as %zs? It would be documented, just like it's documented
that passing pointers to garbage-collected memory to the C side is
inherently unsafe.

> deadalnix's example shows that adding a new format specifier %zs adds
> little value.

It adds convenience, which is an important trait in this day and age.
If that's not a concern, why is printf a symbol you can get your hands
on as soon as you import std.stdio? And if safety is a concern why is
printf used in Phobos at all? I count 427 lines of printf calls in
Phobos and 843 lines in Druntime (druntime might have a good excuse
since it shouldn't import Phobos functions). Many of these calls in
Phobos are not simple D string literal printf calls either.

Btw, some weeks ago when dstep was announced you were jumping for joy
and were instantly proposing language changes to add better support
for wrapping C. But asking for better library support is somehow
controversial. I don't understand the double-standard.