Range of chars (narrow string ranges)

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 27 April 2015 at 17:01:03 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 25, 2015 at 02:27:45AM +0000, Jonathan M Davis via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
> [...]
>> I suppose that a related alternative would be to change it so 
>> that
>> strings aren't considered ranges anymore (at least 
>> temporarily), and
>> force folks to use stuff like byChar or byDChar (or whatever 
>> those
>> functions are) whenever they use strings as ranges. And 
>> actually, that
>> _would_ allow us to get rid of the autodecoding without 
>> rearranging
>> modules. Later, we could change them to being ranges of their 
>> actual
>> element types, or we could just force folks to be explicit 
>> forever in
>> an effort to make the Unicode issues clear, if we thought that 
>> that
>> were better (though it would probably better to just change 
>> front and
>> friends later to work with strings again but not autodecode). 
>> And if
>> an algorithm would work with either autodecoding or without 
>> it, then
>> maybe it could be special cased to accept strings as ranges, 
>> only
>> forcing it in the cases where it the behavior of the algorithm 
>> would
>> change based on whether autodecoding were used or not.
>> 
>> Hmmm. I'm not sure what all of the repercussions of such an 
>> approach
>> would be, but the more I think about it, the more tempting it 
>> seems to
>> me.
> [...]
>
> I would vote for this approach, if we ever decide to get rid of
> autodecoding. I'm OK with either option -- get rid of 
> autodecoding, or
> keep it and use it consistently. What I am *not* OK with is the 
> present,
> and growing, schizophrenic mixture of autodecoding and 
> non-autodecoding
> string functions in Phobos. This inconsistency is going to come 
> back to
> bite us later.

I expect that the two biggest problems causing the current 
situation are

1. Andrei and Walter don't seem to agree on the issue (Andrei 
seems to think that it's not a big deal to leave in the 
autodecoding).

2. While most of the core devs want to get rid of the 
autodecoding, it's a big enough change that we're afraid to do it 
and/or aren't sure of how we could do it without being too 
disruptive.

So, Walter has been pushing the schizophrenic approach in an 
effort to work around the problem. If the core devs could agree 
on an approach to removing autodecoding that wasn't too 
disruptive and somehow get Andrei to go along with it, then we 
could do that and fix the problem, but otherwise, Walter is just 
going to push for the schizophrenic approach, because it at least 
partially fixes the autodecoding problem, and enough of the core 
devs want to ditch the autodecoding that at least some of those 
changes are likely to make it in.

Honestly, I think that we need to figure out what the best 
options are for killing autodecoding and then figure out how to 
convince Andrei of it, but I haven't a clue how to convince 
Andrei unless maybe a solution which isn't very disruptive can be 
found, but it seems like every time the issue comes up, he gets 
annoyed that we're spending time on something unimportant. I do 
think that this limbo needs to stop though, and I think that it's 
clear that while autodecoding seemed like a good idea at first 
(especially if code points really were full characters instead of 
having to worry about graphemes), ultimately, autodecoding is a 
mistake.

- Jonathan M Davis