Why not flag away the mistakes of the past?

[Nick Treleaven]

On Wednesday, 7 March 2018 at 13:24:25 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> I'd actually argue that that's the lesser of the problems with 
> auto-decoding. The big problem is that it's auto-decoding. Code 
> points are almost always the wrong level to be operating at.

For me the fundamental problem is having char[] in the language 
at all, meaning a Unicode string. Arbitrary slicing and indexing 
are not Unicode compatible, if we revisit this we need a String 
type that doesn't support those operations. Plus the issue of 
string validation - a Unicode string type should be assumed to 
have valid contents - unsafe data should only be checked at 
string construction time, so iterating should always be nothrow.