On 12/31/2011 01:12 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 12/30/11 6:07 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
alias std.string.representation raw;
I meant your implementation is incomplete.
It was more a sketch than an implementation. It is not even type safe :o).
But the main point is that presence of representation/raw is not the
issue.
The availability of good-for-nothing .length and operator[] are
the issue. Putting in place the convention of using .raw is hardly
useful within the context.
D strings are arrays. An array without .length and operator[] is close
to being good for nothing. The language specification is quite clear
about the fact that e.g. char is not a character but an utf-8 code unit.
Therefore char[] is an array of code units. length gives the number of
code units. operator[i] gives the i-th code unit. Nothing wrong or
good-for-nothing about that. .raw would return ubyte[], therefore it
would lose all type information. Effectively, what .raw does is a type
cast that will let code point data alias with integral data.
Consider:
void foo(ubyte[] b)in{assert(b.length);}body{
b[0]=2; // perfectly fine
}
void main(){
char[] s = "☺".dup;
auto b = s.raw;
foo(b);
writeln(s); // oops...
}
I fail to understand why that is desirable.
