Regarding hex strings

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 04:39:28PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Oct 2012 14:59:27 +0200
> "foobar" <foo at bar.com> wrote:
> > On Saturday, 20 October 2012 at 10:51:25 UTC, Denis Shelomovskij
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > Maybe. Just an example of a real world code:
> > >
> > > Arrays:
> > > https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/blob/fc45de1d089a1025df60ee2eea66ba27ee0bd99c/src/core/sys/windows/dll.d#L110
> > >
> > > vs
> > >
> > > Hex strings:
> > > https://github.com/denis-sh/hooking/blob/69105a24d77fcb6eca701282a16dd5ec7311c077/tlsfixer/ntdll.d#L130
> > >
> > > By the way, current code isn't affected by the topic issue.
> > 
> > I personally find the former more readable but I guess there 
> > would always be someone to disagree. As the say, YMMV.
> 
> Honestly, I can't imagine how anyone wouldn't find the latter vastly
> more readable.

If you want vastly human readable, you want heredoc hex syntax,
something like this:

	ubyte[] = x"<<END
	32 2b 32 3d 34 2e 20 32 2a 32 3d 34 2e 20 32 5e
	32 3d 34 2e 20 54 68 65 72 65 66 6f 72 65 2c 20
	2b 2c 20 2a 2c 20 61 6e 64 20 5e 20 61 72 65 20
	74 68 65 20 73 61 6d 65 20 6f 70 65 72 61 74 69
	6f 6e 2e 0a 22 36 34 30 4b 20 6f 75 67 68 74 20
	74 6f 20 62 65 20 65 6e 6f 75 67 68 22 20 2d 2d
	20 42 69 6c 6c 20 47 2e 2c 20 31 39 38 34 2e 20
	22 54 68 65 20 49 6e 74 65 72 6e 65 74 20 69 73
	20 6e 6f 74 20 61 20 70 72 69 6d 61 72 79 20 67
	6f 61 6c 20 66 6f 72 20 50 43 20 75 73 61 67 65
	END";

(I just made that syntax up, so the details are not final, but you get
the idea.) I would propose supporting this in D, but then D already has
way too many different ways of writing strings, some of questionable
utility, so I will refrain.

Of course, the above syntax might actually be implementable with a
suitable mixin template that takes a compile-time string. Maybe we
should lobby for such a template to go into Phobos -- that might
motivate people to fix CTFE in dmd so that it doesn't consume
unreasonable amounts of memory when the size of CTFE input gets
moderately large (see other recent thread on this topic).


T

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