String manipulation

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 21 October 2015 at 11:25:17 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
> https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15027 It's a general 
> problem with alias this being an incomplete subtyping.

IMHO, alias this is a disaster for templated code - e.g. it's way 
too easy for something to pass a template constraint thanks to 
alias this but then not actually be converted via the alias in 
the function, so it either ends up not compiling or having weird 
results. And as the recent problems with rangifying functions 
show, taking a function that accepts explicit types and changing 
it to so that it's templated and thus using a template constraint 
rather than explicit types is almost certainly going to break 
code that involves alias this. At this point, I think that we're 
just stuck with it, but honestly, if we could go back, I'd 
strongly argue for ditching the ability to add implicit 
conversions to a type and see how far we could get without them. 
Sure, they can be useful upon occasion, but I really don't think 
that they're worth the pain overall - especially when you use 
templates as heavily as we do.

- Jonathan M Davis