string is rarely useful as a function argument

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/30/11 10:09 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/30/2011 7:30 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> Yes, diligent programmers will generally find such problems, but with the
>> current scheme, it's _so_ easy to use length when you shouldn't, that
>> it's
>> pretty much a guarantee that it's going to happen.
>
> I'm not so sure about that. Timon Gehr's X macro tried to handle UTF-8
> correctly, but it turned out that the naive version that used [i] and
> .length worked correctly. This is typical, not exceptional.

The lower frequency of bugs makes them that much more difficult to spot. 
This is essentially similar to the UTF16/UCS-2 morass: in a vast 
majority of the time the programmer may consider UTF16 a coding with one 
code unit per code point (which is what UCS-2 is). The existence of 
surrogates didn't make much of a difference because, again, very often 
the wrong assumption just worked. Well that all didn't go over all that 
well.

We need .raw and we must abolish .length and [] for narrow strings.


Andrei