Idea: Introduce zero-terminated string specifier

[Jakob Ovrum]

On Tuesday, 2 October 2012 at 21:30:35 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> 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.

writefln cannot be @safe if it has to support an unsafe format 
specifier. It's "hidden" because it affects every call to 
writefln, even if it doesn't use the unsafe format specifier.