A new class -->String

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Dan wrote:

> 
> I totally disagree with Class'ing a simple data type just to introduce
> functions to handle it.

I'm sure we all agree on that. Extending previously closed classes is a
valuable feature in modern object oriented programming.

> 
> Especially since you can use that pretty OO notation on arrays simply by
> having the functions accept the array as the first argument.  This works:
> 
> void slice(inout char[] s, size_t start, size_t finish){
> ...
> }
> 
> char[] myS = "Hello!  How are you?";
> 
> myS.slice(2,6);

That is what I pointed out previously. But the current syntax is limited to
a few special cases. You cannot do something like

auto myS = "moo";

char[] opMul(char[] str, int count) {
        char[] tmp;
        for(int i=0; i<count; i++) tmp ~= str;
        return tmp;
}

auto s2 = myS * 3;  // = "moomoomoo"

Also you cannot specify constraints on the use of these implicit
conversions. I have not enough expertise on this, but it is good to know
that some other languages have found working solutions.