Advent of Code 2019

[Sergei Nosov]

On Saturday, 23 November 2019 at 04:38:14 UTC, mipri wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> There's one more week in November, and then Advent of Code'll
> start again with Christmas-themed programming puzzles, one
> released every midnight US/Eastern, with a second part to each
> puzzle unlocked after you complete the first part. You can read
> more about it at the website: 
> https://adventofcode.com/2019/about

I've only made it halfway through last year.

One of the unexpected difficulties for me was, actually, working 
with strings. The problems involve only ASCII characters, so you 
don't care about the UTF stuff at all. Yet, D always tries to be 
cautious of it and you have to workaround it all the time which 
leads to ugly-looking hacks, like 
https://github.com/snosov1/adventofcode.com/blob/master/2018/day05/day05_2.d

What would be a recommended way to handle such cases? (i.e. when 
you know for sure that your characters are always 8-bit, so it's 
safe to call `sort`, `toUpper` and all the other std functions 
without ever trying to decode)