Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, September 6, 2018 1:04:45 PM MDT aliak via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> D makes the code-point case default and hence that becomes the
> simplest to use. But unfortunately, the only thing I can think of
> that requires code point representations is when dealing
> specifically with unicode algorithms (normalization, etc). Here's
> a good read on code points:
> https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2017/01/14/stop-ascribing-meaning-to-un
> icode-code-points/ -
>
> tl;dr: application logic does not need or want to deal with code
> points. For speed units work, and for correctness, graphemes work.

I think that it's pretty clear that code points are objectively the worst
level to be the default. Unfortunately, changing it to _anything_ else is
not going to be an easy feat at this point. But if we can first ensure that
Phobos in general doesn't rely on it (i.e. in general, it can deal with
ranges of char, wchar, dchar, or graphemes correctly rather than assuming
that all ranges of characters are ranges of dchar), then maybe we can figure
something out. Unfortunately, while some work has been done towards that,
what's mostly happened is that folks have complained about auto-decoding
without doing much to improve the current situation. There's a lot more to
this than simply ripping out auto-decoding even if every D user on the
planet agreed that outright breaking almost every existing D program to get
rid of auto-decoding was worth it. But as with too many things around here,
there's a lot more talking than working. And actually, as such, I should
probably stop discussing this and go do something useful.

- Jonathan M Davis