On Monday, 10 March 2014 at 18:09:51 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:01:45 -0400, John Colvin
<john.loughran.col...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Monday, 10 March 2014 at 17:54:49 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:06:08 -0400, Brad Anderson
<e...@gnuk.net> wrote:
It seems like this would be an even bigger breaking change
than Walter's proposal though (right or wrong, slicing
strings is very common).
You're the second person to mention that, I was not planning
on disabling string slicing. Just random access to individual
chars, and probably .length.
-Steve
How is slicing any better than indexing?
Because one can slice out a multi-code-unit code point, one
cannot access it via index. Strings would be horribly crippled
without slicing. Without indexing, they are fine.
A possibility is to allow index, but actually decode the code
point at that index (error on invalid index). That might
actually be the correct mechanism.
-Steve
In order to be correct, both require exactly the same knowledge:
The beginning of a code point, followed by the end of a code
point. In the indexing case they just happen to be the same
code-point and happen to be one code unit from each other. I
don't see how one is any more or less errror-prone or
fundamentally wrong than the other.
I do understand that slicing is more important however.