Regarding hex strings

[foobar]

On Thursday, 18 October 2012 at 14:29:57 UTC, Don Clugston wrote:
> On 18/10/12 10:58, foobar wrote:
>> On Thursday, 18 October 2012 at 02:47:42 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 02:45:10AM +0200, bearophile wrote:
>>> [...]
>>>> hex strings are useful, but I think they were invented in D1 
>>>> when
>>>> strings were convertible to char[]. But today they are an 
>>>> array of
>>>> immutable UFT-8, so I think this default type is not so 
>>>> useful:
>>>>
>>>> void main() {
>>>>    string data1 = x"A1 B2 C3 D4"; // OK
>>>>    immutable(ubyte)[] data2 = x"A1 B2 C3 D4"; // error
>>>> }
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> test.d(3): Error: cannot implicitly convert expression
>>>> ("\xa1\xb2\xc3\xd4") of type string to ubyte[]
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> Yeah I think hex strings would be better as ubyte[] by 
>>> default.
>>>
>>> More generally, though, I think *both* of the above lines 
>>> should be
>>> equally accepted.  If you write x"A1 B2 C3" in the context of
>>> initializing a string, then the compiler should infer the 
>>> type of the
>>> literal as string, and if the same literal occurs in the 
>>> context of,
>>> say, passing a ubyte[], then its type should be inferred as 
>>> ubyte[], NOT
>>> string.
>>>
>>>
>>> T
>>
>> IMO, this is a redundant feature that complicates the language 
>> for no
>> benefit and should be deprecated.
>> strings already have an escape sequence for specifying 
>> code-points "\u"
>> and for ubyte arrays you can simply use:
>> immutable(ubyte)[] data2 = [0xA1 0xB2 0xC3 0xD4];
>>
>> So basically this feature gains us nothing.
>
> That is not the same. Array literals are not the same as string 
> literals, they have an implicit .dup.
> See my recent thread on this issue (which unfortunately seems 
> have to died without a resolution, people got hung up about 
> trailing null characters without apparently noticing the more 
> important issue of the dup).

I don't see how that detail is relevant to this discussion as I 
was not arguing against string literals or array literals in 
general.

We can still have both (assuming the code points are valid...):
string foo = "\ua1\ub2\uc3"; // no .dup
and:
ubyte[3] goo = [0xa1, 0xb2, 0xc3]; // implicit .dup