Regarding hex strings

[foobar]

On Thursday, 18 October 2012 at 02:47:42 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 02:45:10AM +0200, bearophile wrote:
> [...]
>> hex strings are useful, but I think they were invented in D1 
>> when
>> strings were convertible to char[]. But today they are an 
>> array of
>> immutable UFT-8, so I think this default type is not so useful:
>> 
>> void main() {
>>     string data1 = x"A1 B2 C3 D4"; // OK
>>     immutable(ubyte)[] data2 = x"A1 B2 C3 D4"; // error
>> }
>> 
>> 
>> test.d(3): Error: cannot implicitly convert expression
>> ("\xa1\xb2\xc3\xd4") of type string to ubyte[]
> [...]
>
> Yeah I think hex strings would be better as ubyte[] by default.
>
> More generally, though, I think *both* of the above lines 
> should be
> equally accepted.  If you write x"A1 B2 C3" in the context of
> initializing a string, then the compiler should infer the type 
> of the
> literal as string, and if the same literal occurs in the 
> context of,
> say, passing a ubyte[], then its type should be inferred as 
> ubyte[], NOT
> string.
>
>
> T

IMO, this is a redundant feature that complicates the language 
for no benefit and should be deprecated.
strings already have an escape sequence for specifying 
code-points "\u" and for ubyte arrays you can simply use:
immutable(ubyte)[] data2 = [0xA1 0xB2 0xC3 0xD4];

So basically this feature gains us nothing.