On 9/28/2014 11:39 AM, bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
I'm painfully aware of what a large change removing autodecoding is. That
means it'll take a long time to do it. In the meantime, we can stop adding new
code to Phobos that does autodecoding. We have taken the first step by adding
the .byDchar and .byCodeUnit adapters.
We have .representation and .assumeUTF, I am using it to avoid most autodecoding
problems. Have you tried to use them in your D code?
Yes. They don't work. Well, technically they do "work", but your code gets
filled with explicit casts, which is awful.
The problem is the "representation" of char[] is type char, not type ubyte.
The changes you propose seem able to break almost every D program I have written
(most or all code that uses strings with Phobos ranges/algorithms, and I use
them everywhere). Compared to this change, disallowing comma operator to
implement nice built-in tuples will cause nearly no breakage in my code (I have
done a small analysis of the damages caused by disallowing the tuple operator in
my code). It sounds like a change fit for a D3 language, even more than the
introduction of reference counting. I think this change will cause some people
to permanently stop using D.
It's quite possible we will be unable to make this change. But the question that
started all this would be what would I change if breaking code was allowed.
I suggest that in the future write code that is explicit about the intention -
by character or by decoded character - by using adapters .byChar or .byDchar.
