== Quote from Walter Bright (newshou...@digitalmars.com)'s article > bearophile wrote: > > This odd post comes from reading the nice part about strings of chapter 4 of > > TDPL. In the last few years I have seen changes in how D strings are meant > > and managed, changes that make them less and less like arrays (random-access > > sequences of mutable code units) and more and more what they are at high > > level (immutable bidirectional sequences of code points). > Strings in D are deliberately meant to be arrays, not special things. Other > languages make them special because they have insufficiently powerful arrays. > As for indexing by code point, I also believe this is a mistake. It is > proposed > often, but overlooks: > 1. most string operations, such as copying and searching, even regular > expressions, work just fine using regular indices. > 2. doing the operations in (1) using code points and having to continually > decode the strings would result in disastrously slow code. > 3. the user can always layer a code point interface over the strings, but > going > the other way is not so practical.
4. Sometimes one can make valid assumptions about the contents of a string. For example, in an internal utility app that will never be internationalized you may get away with assuming a character is an ASCII byte. If you know your input will be in the Basic Multilingual Plane (for example if working with pre-sanitized input), you can use wstrings and always assume a character is 2 bytes. 5. For dchar strings, a code unit equals a code point. Should the interface for dchar strings be completely different than that for char and wchar strings?
