better string

[Mike B Johnson via Digitalmars-d]

Why not alias string so that one can easily switch from the old 
string or wstring, etc?

e.g., rename string internally to sstring or whatever.

then globally define

alias string = sstring;

Which can be over realiased to wstring to affect the whole program

alias string = wstring;

Or use a command line to set it or whatever makes you happy.

I'm in the progress of converting a large source code database to 
use the above technique so we can move to using wstring... it is 
not fun. Most code that works with a string should with any 
string encoding, so it shouldn't matter. Making D string 
agnostic(after all, the only main different in 99% of programs is 
the space they take up).

If you are worried about it causing subtle bugs, then don't... 
because those same bugs would occur if one manually had to switch.

By designing techniques to use strings that are agnostic of there 
internal representation should save a lot of headache. For those 
few cases that it matters, simple static analysis works fine.