better string

[Mike B Johnson via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 7 June 2017 at 10:58:06 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
> 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.

I should mention, that with such a design, strings can default to 
the string type, whatever it would be.

e.g.,

"this is a string"

depends on the "alias". If it is sstring then it is an sstring, 
if it is wstring then it is a wstring.

Anything that returns a string will return it depend on the 
alias, even templated functions such as

foreach(name; AliasSeq!(X.tupleof.stringof))

in which, generally makes name a sstring. (I suppose due to 
stringof returning an sstring regardless).