On Sunday, 9 March 2014 at 17:48:47 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 3/9/14, 10:34 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
If we assume strings are normalized then substring search,
equality
testing, sorting all work the same with either code units or
code points.
But others such as edit distance or equal(some_string,
some_wstring) will not.
equal(string, wstring) should either not compile, or would be
overloaded to do the right thing. In an ideal world, char, wchar,
and dchar should not be comparable.
Edit distance on code points is of questionable utility. Like
Vladimir says, its meaning is pretty philosophical, even in ASCII
(is "\r\n" really two "edits"? What is an "edit"?)
I can't think of any case where you would want to count
characters.
wc
% echo € | wc -c
4
:-)
(Generally: I've always been very very very doubtful about
arguments that start with "I can't think of..." because I've
historically tried them so many times, and with terrible
results.)
Fair point... but it's not as if we would be removing the ability
(you could always do s.byCodePoint.count); we are talking about
defaults. The argument that we shouldn't iterate by code unit by
default because people might want to count code points is without
substance. Also, with the proposal, string.count(dchar) would
encode the dchar to a string first for performance, so it would
still work.
Anyway, I think this discussion isn't really going anywhere so I
think I'll agree to disagree and retire.
