Should this work?

[Dicebot]

On Thursday, 9 January 2014 at 16:22:08 UTC, Manu wrote:
> It's nice that it's unicode correct, but it's not nice that you 
> have to be
> familiar with a massive amount of the standard library and you 
> need to
> search through 4-5 (huge! and often poorly documented) modules 
> to find the
> functions you need to perform _basic string operations_, like 
> finding the
> last instance of a character...

That I do agree. One idea is that once everything is split into 
smaller packages we can start providing meta-packages that do 
public imports of small sets of commonly used functions.

Still once needed functions are found I do consider end result 
very robust for what it actually does and don't know any other 
language that does it better.

> My standing opinion is that string manipulation in D is not 
> nice, it is
> possibly the most difficult and time consuming I have used in 
> any language
> ever. Am I alone?

Unicode is the doom. If you only keep ASCII in mind you statement 
is indeed true and D stuff seems ridiculously complicated 
compared even to plain C. But it has also teached me that _every 
single_ program I have written before in other languages was 
broken in regards to Unicode handling. So, yes, it is quite 
difficult but it is the cost for doing what no one else does - 
being correct out of the box. Well, at least in most scenarios :)