I think is a bug?

[Random D user via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Sunday, 12 March 2017 at 01:55:20 UTC, ketmar wrote:
> Random D user wrote:
>
>> How come string* suddenly has a .length property?
>
> due to automatic pointer dereferencing that `.` does. no, not a 
> bug.

Ah... right. Silly me. Of course, since string is actually 
immutable(char)[].
That's bit of a nasty corner case where -> == . isn't that nice. 
Fortunately, it's rare.

Thanks.

This happened to me, when I was packing stuff into SoA layout and 
didn't want to duplicate the length in the struct (implicitly by 
using []). Of course, I forgot to update one place to use the 
shared length.
That is:

length
ptr
ptr
ptr

instead of

ptr
length
ptr
length
ptr
length

Perhaps I should do a SoA layout template that somehow disables 
.length on individual arrays.