Why the hell doesn't foreach decode strings

[Walter Bright]

On 10/21/2011 4:14 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> Making such a string type would be terribly inefficient. It would make D
>> completely uncompetitive for processing strings.
>
> I don't think it would. Do you have any proof to support this?

I've done string processing code, and done a lot of profiling of them. Every 
cycle is critical, and decoding adds a *lot* of cycles.