On 3/6/2014 7:31 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Whoa. You're not serious about changing this now, are you? Because even though I would support such a change, you have to realize the magnitude of code breakage that will happen. A lot of code that iterates over narrow strings will break, and worse yet, they will break *silently*. Calling count() on a narrow string will not return the expected value, for example. And existing code that iterates over narrow strings expecting dchars to come out of it will suddenly silently convert to char, and may pass by unnoticed until somebody runs the program with a multibyte character in the input.
I understand this all too well. (Note that we currently have a different silent problem: unnoticed large performance problems.)
This is very high risk change IMO. You're welcome to create a (temporary) Phobos fork that reverts narrow string auto-decoding, of course, and people can try it out to see how much actual breakage is happening. If you really want to push for this, that might be the safest way to test the waters before committing to such a major change. Silent breakage is not easy to test for, unfortunately. :(
I posted a plan in another message in this thread. It'll be a long process, but I think it's doable.
