VLERange: a range in between BidirectionalRange and RandomAccessRange

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 1/16/11 6:42 PM, Daniel Gibson wrote:
> 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 consider UTF8 superior to all of the above.

>>>> 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

I think German text works well with dchar.


Andrei