On Friday, 3 June 2016 at 00:14:13 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
5. Normalization, graphemes, and locales should all be explicitly opt-in with corresponding library code.
Add decoding to that list and we're right there with you.
7. At some point, as the threads on autodecode amply illustrate, working with level 2 or level 3 Unicode requires a certain level of understanding on the part of the programmer writing the code, because there simply is no overarching correct way to do things. The programmer is going to have to understand what he is trying to accomplish with Unicode and select the code/algorithms accordingly.
Working at any level of Unicode in a systems programming language requires knowledge of Unicode. The thing is, because D is a systems language, we can't have the default behavior to decode to grapheme clusters, and because of that, we have to have everything be opt-in, because everything else is fundamentally wrong on some level. Once you step out of scripting language land, you can't get around requiring Unicode knowledge. Like I said in my blog,
Unicode is hard. Trying to hide Unicode specifics helps no one because it's going to bite you in the ass eventually.
