Shouldn't hasSwappableElements work on char arrays?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, February 24, 2011 14:55:34 bearophile wrote:
> Jonathan M Davis:
> > Honestly, I think that the need for actual ASCII strings is quite rare
> > and that it _should_ not be encouraged.
> 
> I need ASCII strings (or mutable/immutable arrays of ASCII chars) all the
> time, they come from English text, genomic data, etc.

And I would strongly argue that you shouldn't be using ASCII for text unless you 
_need_ to. Unicode does the job just fine and doesn't run into problems when you 
end up having to have non-ASCII characters. Far, far too many programs have been 
written with the assumption that ASCII was good enough and then had to be 
altered to work with unicode later. Using pure ASCII should be an optimization 
and only done if it's necessary.

For something like genomic data, there's a good chance that such an optimization 
would be necessary because you needed a random-access range and you risk using 
too much memory using dstrings (and you know that all of the characters are 
valid chars, because they're limited to the few characters used to hold genomic 
data). But most people aren't dealing with genomic data. They're usually dealing 
with text, and text should be unicode. Assuming that all you're ever going to 
need is ASCII characters is generally unwise when dealing with text.

- Jonathan M Davis