On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 05:12:55PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote: > On 3/15/2015 4:06 AM, "Marc =?UTF-8?B?U2Now7x0eiI=?= <schue...@gmx.net>" > wrote: > >This I agree with. Their usefulness is also greatly diminished by > >them being strings, instead of byte (ubyte?) arrays. When would you > >actually want to write a string (= text) using hex notation? > > 1. test data
This is about the only valid use case I can think of. And it's really only useful in druntime/Phobos test cases. I can't imagine users would go out of their way to use generate binary test data where string input is desired. > 2. strings that aren't in UTF format Uhm... strings that aren't in UTF format really ought to be ubyte[] (resp. ushort[], uint[]), not string, because pretty much everything in D that takes a (|w|d)string argument expects UTF encoding. (Or, in an ideal world where std.encoding is actually sane, we'd use suitable wrapper types for ubyte[] that represent their respective encoding.) > 3. strings with other data embedded in them Again, shouldn't these be ubyte[]? Calling them string (i.e. immutable(char)[]) is a wrong conflation of ubyte with char, that has led to so much headache in C/C++. D should not repeat this mistake. T -- English has the lovely word "defenestrate", meaning "to execute by throwing someone out a window", or more recently "to remove Windows from a computer and replace it with something useful". :-) -- John Cowan
