Why not flag away the mistakes of the past?

[Guillaume Piolat]

On Wednesday, 7 March 2018 at 13:24:25 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 07, 2018 12:53:16 Guillaume Piolat via 
> Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 7 March 2018 at 06:00:30 UTC, Taylor Hillegeist
>>
>> wrote:
>> > That way the breaking change was easily fixable, and the 
>> > mistakes of the past not forever. Is it just the cost of 
>> > maintenance?
>>
>> auto-decoding problem was mostly that it couldn't be @nogc 
>> since throwing, but with further releases exception throwing 
>> will get @nogc. So it's getting fixed.
>
> 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. 
> The programmer needs to be in control of whether the code is 
> operating on code units, code points, or graphemes, and because 
> of auto-decoding, we have to constantly avoid using the range 
> primitives for arrays on strings. Tons of range-based code has 
> to special case for strings in order to work around 
> auto-decoding. We're constantly fighting our own API in order 
> to process strings sanely and efficiently.

I'd agree with you, hate the special casing. However it seems to 
me this has been debated to death already, and that auto-decoding 
was successfully advocated by Alexandrescu and al; surviving the 
controversy years ago.