On Monday, 10 March 2014 at 22:15:34 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:46:23 -0400, John Colvin
<john.loughran.col...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Monday, 10 March 2014 at 13:35:33 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
I proposed this inside the long "major performance problem
with std.array.front," I've also proposed it before, a long
time ago.
But seems to be getting no attention buried in that thread,
not even negative attention :)
An idea to fix the whole problems I see with char[] being
treated specially by phobos: introduce an actual string type,
with char[] as backing, that is a dchar range, that actually
dictates the rules we want. Then, make the compiler use this
type for literals.
e.g.:
struct string {
immutable(char)[] representation;
this(char[] data) { representation = data;}
... // dchar range primitives
}
Then, a char[] array is simply an array of char[].
points:
1. No more issues with foreach(c; "cassé"), it iterates via
dchar
2. No more issues with "cassé"[4], it is a static compiler
error.
3. No more awkward ASCII manipulation using ubyte[].
4. No more phobos schizophrenia saying char[] is not an array.
5. No more special casing char[] array templates to fool the
compiler.
6. Any other special rules we come up with can be dictated by
the library, and not ignored by the compiler.
Note, std.algorithm.copy(string1, mutablestring) will still
decode/encode, but it's more explicit. It's EXPLICITLY a
dchar range. Use std.algorithm.copy(string1.representation,
mutablestring.representation) will avoid the issues.
I imagine only code that is currently UTF ignorant will
break, and that code is easily 'fixed' by adding the
'representation' qualifier.
-Steve
just to check I understand this fully:
in this new scheme, what would this do?
auto s = "cassé".representation;
foreach(i, c; s) write(i, ':', c, ' ');
writeln(s);
Currently - without the .representation - I get
0:c 1:a 2:s 3:s 4:e 5:̠6:`
cassé
or, to spell it out a bit more:
0:c 1:a 2:s 3:s 4:e 5:xCC 6:x81
cassé
The plan is for foreach on s to iterate by char, and foreach on
"cassé" to iterate by dchar.
What this means is the accent will be iterated separately from
the e, and likely gets put onto the colon after 5. However, the
half code-units that has no meaning anywhere (xCC and X81)
would not be iterated.
In your above code, using .representation would be equivalent
to what it is now without .representation (i.e. over char), and
without .representation would be equivalent to this on today's
compiler (except faster):
foreach(i, dchar c; s)
-Steve
Awesome, let's do this :)
