Argumnentation against external function operator overloading is unconvincing

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, September 22, 2016 08:51:59 Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> On 9/22/16 6:38 AM, pineapple wrote:
> > The greatest offender I've found is how in phobos, arrays do not behave
> > as ranges without importing the module defining their range operations.
>
> Would make sense to move those few primitives to object.d. I've been
> thinking of that a long time ago but back then there was a vague stance
> that object.d shouldn't contain templates. Since then that has changed.
> -- Andrei

The main problem with moving them there is auto-decoding. front and popFront
for strings require std.utf in order to do their thing. So, if we move them
to druntime, then that code would need to be duplicated (though similar code
already has to exist in druntime for foreach loops), and we'd have a problem
with invalid unicode in that it couldn't through std.utf.UTFException like
it would now (though ideally, we'd stop throwing on invalid unicode and use
the replacement character).

That being said, I agree that the range functions for arrays should go in
object.d. It's just that the way we handle narrow strings as ranges makes it
problematic.

- Jonathan M Davis