D's confusing strings (was Re: D on hackernews)

[Christophe]

Timon Gehr , dans le message (digitalmars.D:144889), a écrit :
> unicode natively. Yet the 'D strings are strange and confusing' argument 
> comes up quite often on the web.

Well, I think they are. The ptr+length stuff is amasing, but the 
behavior of strings in phobos is weird.

mini-quiz: what should std.range.drop(some_string, 1) do ?
hint: what it actually does is not what the documentation of phobos 
suggests*...

Strings are array of char, but they appear like a lazy range of dchar to 
phobos. I could cope with the fact that this is a little unexpected for 
beginners. But well, that creates a lot of exceptions in phobos, like 
the fact that you can't even copy a char[] to a char[] with 
std.algorithm.copy. And I don't mention all the optimization that are 
not/cannot be performed for those strings. I'll just remember to use 
ubyte[] wherever I can...

* Please, someone just adds in the documentation of IsSliceable that 
narrow strings are an exception, like it was recently added to 
hasLength.

-- 
Christophe