The Case Against Autodecode

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/30/16 7:52 PM, Seb wrote:
> On Monday, 30 May 2016 at 21:39:14 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> On Monday, 30 May 2016 at 16:34:49 UTC, Jack Stouffer wrote:
>>> On Monday, 30 May 2016 at 16:25:20 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>> D1 -> D2 was a vastly more disruptive change than getting rid of
>>>> auto-decoding would be.
>>>
>>> Don't be so sure. All string handling code would become broken, even
>>> if it appears to work at first.
>>
>> Assuming silent breakage is on the table, what would be broken, really?
>>
>> Code that must intentionally count or otherwise operate code points,
>> sure. But how much of all string handling code is like that?
>>
>> Perhaps it would be worth trying to silently remove autodecoding and
>> seeing how much of Phobos breaks, as an experiment. Has this been
>> tried before?
>>
>> (Not saying this is a route we should take, but it doesn't seem to me
>> that it will break "all string handling code" either.)
>
> 132 lines in Phobos use auto-decoding - that should be fixable ;-)
>
> See them: http://sprunge.us/hUCL
> More details: https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4384

Thanks for this investigation! Results are about as I'd have speculated. 
-- Andrei