char array weirdness

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 03:22:48AM +0000, Jack Stouffer via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
> On Tuesday, 29 March 2016 at 23:42:07 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >Believe it or not, it was only last year (IIRC, maybe the year
> >before) that Walter "discovered" that Phobos does autodecoding, and
> >got pretty upset over it.  If even Walter wasn't aware of this for
> >that long...
> 
> The link (I think this is what you're referring to) to that
> discussion: http://forum.dlang.org/post/lfbg06$30kh$1@digitalmars.com
> 
> It's a shame Walter never got his way. Special casing ranges like this
> is a huge mistake.

To be fair, one *could* make a case of autodecoding, if it was done
right, i.e., segmenting by graphemes, which is what is really expected
by users when they think of "characters". This would allow users to
truly think in terms of characters (in the intuitive sense) when they
work with strings. However, segmenting by graphemes is, in general,
quite expensive, and few algorithms actually need to do this. Most don't
need to -- a pretty large part of string processing consists of looking
for certain markers, mostly punctuation and control characters, and
treating the stuff in between as opaque data. If we didn't have
autodecoding, would be a simple matter of searching for sentinel
substrings.  This also indicates that most of the work done by
autodecoding is unnecessary -- it's wasted work since most of the string
data is treated opaquely anyway.

The unfortunate situation in Phobos currently is that we are neither
doing it right (segmenting by graphemes), *and* we're inefficient
because we're constantly decoding all that data that the application is
mostly going to treat as opaque data anyway.  It's the worst of both
worlds.

I wish we could get consensus for implementing Walter's plan to phase
out autodecoding (as proposed in the linked thread above).


T

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