[phobos] isStringLike

[Vladimir Panteleev via phobos]

On Monday, 26 October 2015 at 21:27:37 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> My recommendation was to remove the alias this in DirEntry that 
> tried to turn it into a string. A DirEntry is not a wrapper for 
> a string, in particular, it does not support range primitives, 
> which is why the string functions failed when changed to have 
> InputRange parameters. Adding range primitives to DirEntry 
> would cause other weird problems, because DirEntry is 
> fundamentally not a range (a range 'consumes' its data via 
> popFront() which makes no sense for DirEntry).
>
> Yes, that breaks:
>
>     DirEntry direntry;
>     remove(direntry);
>
> which must be rewritten as:
>
>     DirEntry direntry;
>     remove(direntry.name);
>
> and we're not supposed to break existing code. But the 
> alternative, which is redoing every template that accepts an 
> InputRange, seems an awfully heavy burden.

DirEntry is not the only source of problems. For example, the 
rangification also broke ae.utils.funopt, which also uses structs 
with an alias this'd string.

http://blog.thecybershadow.net/2014/08/05/ae-utils-funopt/