More fun with autodecoding

[Jon Degenhardt]

On Saturday, 8 September 2018 at 15:36:25 UTC, Steven 
Schveighoffer wrote:
> On 8/9/18 2:44 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 8/8/2018 2:01 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> Here's where I'm struggling -- because a string provides 
>>> indexing, slicing, length, etc. but Phobos ignores that. I 
>>> can't make a new type that does the same thing. Not only 
>>> that, but I'm finding the specializations of algorithms only 
>>> work on the type "string", and nothing else.
>> 
>> One of the worst things about autodecoding is it is special, 
>> it *only* steps in for strings. Fortunately, however, that 
>> specialness enabled us to save things with byCodePoint and 
>> byCodeUnit.
>
> So it turns out that technically the problem here, even though 
> it seemed like an autodecoding problem, is a problem with 
> splitter.
>
> splitter doesn't deal with encodings of character ranges at all.

This could partially explain why when I tried byCodeUnit and 
friends awhile ago I concluded it wasn't a reasonable approach: 
splitter is in the middle of much of what I've written.

Even if splitter is changed I'll still be very doubtful about the 
byCodeUnit approach as a work-around. An automated way to 
validate that it is engaged only when necessary would be very 
helpful (@noautodecode perhaps? :))

--Jon