Justin Johansson wrote:
Chris Nicholson-Sauls Wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Bill Baxter wrote:
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 11:51 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> wrote:
Bill Baxter wrote:
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 8:47 AM, Jeremie Pelletier <[email protected]>
wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
303 pages and counting!
Andrei
Soon the PI level, or at least 10 times PI!
A hundred even. ;-)
Coming along. I'm writing about strings and Unicode right now. I was
wondering what people think about allowing concatenation (with ~ and
~=) of
strings of different character widths. The support library could do
all of
the transcoding.
(I understand that concatenating an array of wchar or char with a
dchar is
already in bugzilla.)
So a common way to convert wchar to char might then become
""~myWcharString?
That seems kind of odd.
Well, I guess. In particular, to me it's not clear what type we should
assign to a concatenation between a string and a wstring. With ~=, it's
much easier...
My intuition would be to expect the same as adding an int to a byte: you get an int.
Concatenating a string and a wstring should yield a wstring; ie, encode to the wider of
the two types.
-- Chris Nicholson-Sauls
Though I'm sure Shannon would say that the number of bits of intrinsic
information
contained in the same sequence of Unicode codepoints is exactly the same whether
it be encoded as a string or a wstring. Accordingly my intuition is that some
rule
based upon left-to-right associativity would be more apt. You could then
concatenate
a wstring (on the rhs) to an empty string (on the lhs) to convert the wstring
to a string
or vica versa.
Cheers
Justin Johansson
Granted LTR is common enough to be expectable and acceptable. To be perfectly honest, I
don't believe I have *ever* even used wchar/wstring. Char/string gosh yes; dchar/dstring
quite a bit as well, where I need the simplicity; but I've yet to feel much need for the
"weirdo" middle child of UTF.
I would argue that string ~ wstring returning string is fine, but would suggest it be a
warning for those like myself who might have first guessed it would "upscale to fit".
Just so long as the foreach(dchar;string) trick is still around, char/string can cover an
awful lot of ground.
All that said, though, I don't think I would ever use ""~wstring as a means of conversion.
It just feels like "there wasn't any other way to do this, so here's a cheap hack" --
which just isn't the case.
-- Chris Nicholson-Sauls
