Why Strings as Classes?

[superdan]

Benji Smith Wrote:

> BCS wrote:
> > Ditto, D is a *systems language* It's *supposed* to have access to the 
> > lowest level representation and build stuff on top of that
> 
> But in this "systems language", it's a O(n) operation to get the nth 
> character from a string, to slice a string based on character offsets, 
> or to determine the number of characters in the string.
> 
> I'd gladly pay the price of a single interface vtable lookup to turn all 
> of those into O(1) operations.

dood. i dunno where to start. allow me to answer from multiple angles.

1. when was the last time looking up one char in a string or computing length was your bottleneck.

2. you talk as if o(1) happens by magic that d currently disallows.

3. maybe i don't want to blow the size of my string by a factor of 4 if i'm just interested in some occasional character search.

4. implement all that nice stuff you wanna. nobody put a gun to yer head not to. understand you can't put a gun to my head to pay the price.