monarch_dodra:
Would that actually change anything though? I mean what with
alignment and everything, wouldn't returning a char be just as
expansive? I'm not 100% sure.
If you are thinking about the number of operations, then it's the
same, as both a char and dchar value go in a register. The run
time is the same, especially after inlining.
What is your use case that would require this?
I have a char[] like:
['a','x','b','a','c','x','f']
Every char encodes something. Putting it to upper case means that
that data was already used:
['a','X','b','a','C','x','f']
In this case to use toUpper I have to use:
cast(char)toUpper(foo[1])
What's I am trying to minimize is the number of cast(). On the
other hand even in C toupper returns a type larger than char:
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide/2.2.html
It's just D has contract programming, and this module is written
for ASCII, so it's able to be smarter than C functions, and
return a char.
Bye,
bearophile
