Idea: Introduce zero-terminated string specifier

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Saturday, 29 September 2012 at 02:07:38 UTC, Andrej Mitrovic 
wrote:
> I've noticed I'm having to do a lot of to!string calls when I 
> want to
> call the versatile writef() function. So I was thinking, why not
> introduce a special zero-terminated string specifier which 
> would both
> alleviate the need to call to!string and would probably save on
> needless memory allocation. If all we want to do is print 
> something,
> why waste time duplicating a string?

I just checked and std.conv.to always allocates a copy, even when 
constness doesn't require it. It should not reallocate when 
constness doesn't change, or is a safe conversion (e.g. immutable 
-> const).

A discussion on a related topic (formatting of C strings results 
in unexpected behavior) is here: 
http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=8384