Interesting trivia, I even found this bug in the documentation of the first dmd release http://downloads.dlang.org/releases/0.x/0.100/dmd.100.zip.
Checking For Empty Strings C++ strings use a function to determine if a string is empty: string str; if (str.empty()) // string is empty In D, an empty string is just null: char[] str; if (!str) // string is empty Apparently it was later fixed to if (!str.length) http://www.digitalmars.com/d/1.0/cppstrings.html.