On Wed, 03 Feb 2010 21:00:21 -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
(a) Do not operate the change at all.
(b) Operate the change and mention that in range algorithms you should
check hasLength and only then use "length" under the assumption that it
really means "elements count".
(c) Deprecate the name .length for UTF-8 and UTF-16 strings, and define
a different name for that. Any other name (codeUnits, codes etc.) would
do. The entire point is to not make algorithms believe strings have a
.length property.
(d) Have std.range define a distinct property called e.g. "count" and
then specialize it appropriately. Then change all references to .length
in std.algorithm and elsewhere to .count.
What would you do? Any ideas are welcome.
I like b) and d), with a slight preference for d. I think the benefits of
strings being encoding correct and able to use std.algorithm outweighs the
disadvantages. And making char[] different from T[] is going to play havoc
with templated algorithms. Another alternative is to remove the char types
from the language and implement them as library ranges.
