Why the hell doesn't foreach decode strings

[Timon Gehr]

On 10/22/2011 02:14 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2011-10-21 20:38, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 10/21/2011 2:51 AM, Martin Nowak wrote:
>>> You have a good point here. I would have immediately thrown out the
>>> loop AFTER
>>> profiling.
>>> What hits me here is that I had an incorrect program with built-in
>>> unicode aware
>>> strings.
>>> This is counterintuitive to correct unicode handling throughout the
>>> std library,
>>> and even more to the complementary operation of appending any char
>>> type to strings.
>>
>> I understand the issue, but I don't think it's resolvable. It's a lot
>> like the signed/unsigned issue. Java got rid of it by simply not having
>> any unsigned types.
>
> Can't we implement a new string type that people can choose to use if
> they want. It will hide all the Unicode details that has been brought up
> by this thread.
>

Having multiple standard string types is bad. Furthermore, it is hard to 
meaningfully hide all the Unicode details. Not even immutable(dchar)[] 
necessarily encodes one character as one code unit.