Narrow string is not a random access range

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 10/23/12 11:58 AM, mist wrote:
> On Tuesday, 23 October 2012 at 15:55:23 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 10/23/12 11:36 AM, mist wrote:
>>> Was thinking on this topic after seeing this:
>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13014999/cannot-slice-taker-from-std-range-in-d
>>>
>>>
>>> Still can't understand rationale here. Why native slicing / random
>>> access is allowed for narrow strings, but trait explicitly negates this?
>>
>> Historical mistake.
>>
>> Andrei
>
> Is string random access gonna be deprecated some day then or this is
> considered a mistake we need to get used to? :)

Walter is unconvinced it's a mistake, which doesn't make it any easier. 
If I had my way, I'd require people to write str.rep[6] to access the 
sixth byte in the representation of a UTF-8 or UTF-16 string. It would 
make D's strings from great to indistinguishable from perfect.

Andrei