On 5/31/16 8:46 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
It is not practical to just delete or deprecate autodecode - it is too
embedded into things. What we can do, however, is stop using it
ourselves and stop relying on it in the documentation, much like [] is
eschewed in favor of std::vector in C++.
The way to deal with it is to replace reliance on autodecode with
.byDchar (.byDchar has a bonus of not throwing an exception on invalid
UTF, but using the replacement dchar instead.)
To that end, and this will be an incremental process:
1. Temporarily break autodecode such that using it will cause a compile
error. Then, see what breaks in Phobos and fix those to use .byDchar
2. Change examples in the documentation and the Phobos examples to use
.byDchar
3. Best practices should use .byDchar, .byWchar, .byChar, .byCodeUnit
when dealing with ranges/arrays of characters to make it clear what is
happening.
I gotta be honest, if the end of this tunnel doesn't have a char[] array
which acts like an array in all circumstances, I see little point in
changing anything.
-Steve
