Policy for exposing range structs

[Anon via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 31 March 2016 at 11:15:18 UTC, Johan Engelen wrote:
> Hi Anon,
>   I've started implementing your idea. But perhaps you already 
> have a beginning of an implementation? If so, please contact me 
> :)
> https://github.com/JohanEngelen
>
> Thanks,
>   Johan

No, I haven't started implemented things for that idea. The 
experiments I did with it were by manually altering mangled names 
in Vim.

I've been spending my D time thinking about potential changes to 
how template string value parameters are encoded. My code is a 
bit messy (and not integrated with the compiler at all), but I 
use a bootstring technique (similar to Punycode[1]) to encode 
Unicode text using only [a-zA-Z0-9_].

The results are always smaller than base16 and base64 encodings. 
For plain ASCII text, the encoding tends to grow by a small 
amount. For text containing larger UTF-8 code points, the 
encoding usually ends up smaller than the raw UTF-8 string.

A couple examples of my encoder at work:

---
some_identifier
some_identifier_

/usr/include/d/std/stdio.d
usrincludedstdstdiod_jqacdhbd

Hello, World!
HelloWorld_0far4i


こんにちは世界 (UTF-8: 21 bytes)
XtdCDr5mL02g3rv (15 bytes)
---

I still need to clean up the encoder/decoder and iron out some 
specifics on how this could fit into the mangling, but I should 
have time to work on this some more later today/tomorrow.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode