Higher level built-in strings

[Walter Bright]

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:21:34 -0400, Walter Bright 
> <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> 
>> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> The omission of dchar is on purpose.  Phobos has characterized string 
>>> as a bidirectional range of dchars.  For every range where I do:
>>>  foreach(e; range)
>>>  e is of the type of the range.  Except for char and wchar.  This 
>>> schizophrenia of type induction is very bad for D, and it's a good 
>>> argument of why strings should not simply be arrays.
>>
>> For many algorithms on strings, iterating by char is preferred over 
>> dchar, even for multibyte strings.
> 
> Huh?  Which ones?

Searching, for one.


> AFAIK, all of std.algorithm treats strings as ranges 
> of dchar.

Andrei posted elsewhere that there were specializations for strings to do it one 
way or the other based on which was more efficient.