Proposal for fixing dchar ranges

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:01:45 -0400, John Colvin  
<john.loughran.colvin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Monday, 10 March 2014 at 17:54:49 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:06:08 -0400, Brad Anderson <eco at gnuk.net> wrote:
>>
>>> It seems like this would be an even bigger breaking change than  
>>> Walter's proposal though (right or wrong, slicing strings is very  
>>> common).
>>
>> You're the second person to mention that, I was not planning on  
>> disabling string slicing. Just random access to individual chars, and  
>> probably .length.
>>
>> -Steve
>
> How is slicing any better than indexing?

Because one can slice out a multi-code-unit code point, one cannot access  
it via index. Strings would be horribly crippled without slicing. Without  
indexing, they are fine.

A possibility is to allow index, but actually decode the code point at  
that index (error on invalid index). That might actually be the correct  
mechanism.

-Steve