VLERange: a range in between BidirectionalRange and RandomAccessRange

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 17.01.2011 00:58, schrieb Andrei Alexandrescu:
> On 1/16/11 3:20 PM, Michel Fortin wrote:
>> On 2011-01-16 14:29:04 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:
>>> But most strings don't contain combining characters or unnormalized
>>> strings.
>>
>> I think we should expect combining marks to be used more and more as our
>> OS text system and fonts start supporting them better. Them being rare
>> might be true today, but what do you know about tomorrow?
>
> I don't think languages will acquire more diacritics soon. I do hope, of
> course, that D applications gain more usage in the Arabic, Hebrew etc.
> world.
>

So why does D use unicode anyway?
If you don't care about not-often used languages anyway, you could have 
used UCS-2 like java. Or plain 8bit ISO-8859-* (the user can decide 
which encoding he wants/needs).

You could as well say "we don't need to use dchar to represent a proper 
code point, wchar is enough for most use cases and has fewer overhead 
anyway".


>>> I think it's reasonable to understand why I'm happy with the current
>>> state of affairs. It is better than anything we've had before and
>>> better than everything else I've tried.
>>
>> It is indeed easy to understand why you're happy with the current state
>> of affairs: you never had to deal with multi-code-point character and
>> can't imagine yourself having to deal with them on a semi-frequent
>> basis.
>
> Do you, and can you?
>
>> Other people won't be so happy with this state of affairs, but
>> they'll probably notice only after most of their code has been written
>> unaware of the problem.
>
> They can't be unaware and write said code.
>

Fun fact: Germany recently introduced a new ID card and some of the 
software that was developed for this and is used in some record sections 
fucks up when a name contains diacritics.

I think especially when you're handling names (and much software does, I 
think) it's crucial to have proper support for all kinds of chars.
Of course many programmers are not aware that, if Umlaute and ß works it 
doesn't mean that all other kinds of strange characters work as well.


Cheers,
- Daniel