The Case Against Autodecode

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/28/16 6:59 AM, Marc Schütz wrote:
> The fundamental problem is choosing one of those possibilities over the
> others without knowing what the user actually wants, which is what both
> BEFORE and AFTER do.

OK, that's a fair argument, thanks. So it seems there should be no 
"default" way to iterate a string, and furthermore iterating for each 
constituent of a string should be fairly rare. Strings and substrings 
yes, but not individual points/units/graphemes unless expressly asked. 
(Indeed some languages treat strings as first-class entities and 
individual characters are mere short substrings.)

So it harkens back to the original mistake: strings should NOT be arrays 
with the respective primitives.


Andrei