The Case Against Autodecode

[Marc Schütz via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 2 June 2016 at 13:11:10 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On 6/1/16 6:31 AM, Marc Schütz wrote:
>> I believe everything that does only concatenation will work 
>> correctly.
>> That's why joiner() is one of those algorithms that should 
>> accept
>> strings directly without going through any decoding (but it 
>> may need to
>> recode the joining element itself, of course).
>
> This means that a string is a range. What is it a range of? If 
> you want to make it a range of code units, I think you will 
> lose that battle.
>

No, I don't want to make string a range of anything, I want to 
provide an additional overload for joiner() that accepts a 
const(char)[], and returns a range of chars.

The remark about the joining element is that

     ["abc", "xyz"].joiner(","d)

should convert ","d to "," first, to match the element type of 
the elements. But this is purely a convenience; it can also be 
pushed to the user.

> If you want to special-case joiner for strings, that's always 
> possible.

Yes, that's what I want. Sorry if it wasn't clear.

> Or string could be changed to be a range of dchar struct 
> explicitly. Then at least joiner makes sense, and I can 
> reasonably explain why it behaves the way it does.
>
> -Steve