might be a bug in the DMD FrontEnd

[Daniel Keep]

Deewiant wrote:
> Daniel Keep wrote:
>> Davidl wrote:
>>> i don't see what prevent the following from compiling:
>> I can see a few things...
> 
> <...>
> 
>> cast(char)192, whilst technically valid, is really nasty.  For starters,
>> '192' isn't a valid character by itself in UTF-8, which means it can't
>> be printed.
> 
> <...>
> 
>> Please don't use printf, at least not without passing the string through
>> toStringz.  writefln works perfectly fine.
> 
> Perhaps he's using printf because he wants to output the byte 192 without
> getting an "Error: 4invalid UTF-8 sequence". I've found that, currently, in both
> Phobos and Tango, the C library is the best way of outputting a character whilst
> letting the user worry about whether he can see it properly in his locale or not.
> 
> The point about toStringz still stands, though.

True; I hadn't considered that.  The first thing I thought was that he
didn't know about Unicode literals, and was trying to manually encode
the character in UTF-16.

That said, I personally think that if you need to use printf because
writefln is barfing on your string, then that's a bug in your program.
char[] is UTF-8: if you're not storing UTF-8, you should be using
ubyte[], not char[].

Incidentally, since D source must be either ASCII or some variant of
UTF, cast(char)192 isn't a valid character *anyway*, unless it's part of
a multibyte code-point, at which point the argument for outputting it
literally falls apart since he's using it in a mixin :P

Also, I just realised that the "you can't cast arrays of chars around"
is something I should add to my text in D article...

	-- Daniel

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