"bearophile" <bearophileh...@lycos.com> wrote in message news:hoh07b$16k...@digitalmars.com... > Walter Bright: > >>Yes, we can endlessly rename keywords, but in the end, what does that >>accomplish that would compensate for upending every D program in >>existence?< > > I can list few pro/cons, but then the decision is not mine. > > The wchar/dchar are short names, easy to write, but for me and a person > I've shown/taught D it doesn't result easy to remember their size in > bytes. "w" stands for wide, "d" for double, this is easy to remember. But > how wide is wide? That's why I have suggested to adopt more descriptive > names for them. > > A way to invent descriptive names is to use names similar to the > byte/shot/int/long integers. Or to use numbers after the "char". I guess > now it can be too much late to change type names... >
As long as we're bikeshedding on type names, I do find it misleading that "char" represents a code-unit while still calling itself a "character". Don't get me wrong, I don't mind that at the language level D operates on code-units instead of code-points (Tango and Phobos2 have pretty darned good handling of code-points anyway). It's just that ever since learning how Unicode works, it seems rather a misleading misnomer to call a code-unit "char". I can live with it, of course, now that I know, but I don't envy the newbies who may come across it.