The Case Against Autodecode

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 05/30/2016 07:58 AM, Marc Schütz wrote:
> On Saturday, 28 May 2016 at 12:04:20 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 5/28/16 6:59 AM, Marc Schütz wrote:
>>> The fundamental problem is choosing one of those possibilities over the
>>> others without knowing what the user actually wants, which is what both
>>> BEFORE and AFTER do.
>>
>> OK, that's a fair argument, thanks. So it seems there should be no
>> "default" way to iterate a string, and furthermore iterating for each
>> constituent of a string should be fairly rare. Strings and substrings
>> yes, but not individual points/units/graphemes unless expressly asked.
>> (Indeed some languages treat strings as first-class entities and
>> individual characters are mere short substrings.)
>>
>> So it harkens back to the original mistake: strings should NOT be
>> arrays with the respective primitives.
>
> I think this is going too far. It's sufficient if they (= char slices,
> not ranges) can't be iterated over directly, i.e. aren't input ranges
> (and maybe don't work with foreach).

That's... what I said. -- Andrei