Why not flag away the mistakes of the past?

Henrik henrik at nothing.com
Thu Mar 8 23:35:05 UTC 2018


On Thursday, 8 March 2018 at 17:35:11 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 08, 2018 at 10:14:16AM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> [...]
> [...]
>> [...]
> [...]
>
> Yeah, the only reason autodecoding survived in the beginning 
> was because Andrei (wrongly) thought that a Unicode code point 
> was equivalent to a grapheme.  If that had been the case, the 
> cost associated with auto-decoding may have been justifiable.  
> Unfortunately, that is not the case, which greatly diminishes 
> most of the advantages that autodecoding was meant to have.  So 
> it ended up being something that incurred a significant 
> performance hit, yet did not offer the advantages it was 
> supposed to.  To fully live up to Andrei's original vision, it 
> would have to include grapheme segmentation as well.  
> Unfortunately, graphemes are of arbitrary length and cannot in 
> general fit in a single dchar (or any fixed-size type), and 
> grapheme segmentation is extremely costly to compute, so doing 
> it by default would kill D's string manipulation performance.
>
> [...]

Which companies are against changing this? They must be powerful 
indeed if their convenience is important enough to protect so 
destructive features. Even C++ managed to give up trigraphs 
against the will of IBM. Surely D can give up something that is 
even more destructive?



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