On 6/28/12 5:28 AM, Christophe Travert wrote:
As a more general comment, I think having a consistent langage is a very important goal to achieve when designing a langage. It makes everything simpler, from langage design to user through compiler and library development. It may not be too late for D.
In a way it's too late for any language in actual use. The "fog of language design" makes it nigh impossible to design a language/library combo that is perfectly consistent, not to mention the fact that consistency itself has many dimensions, some of which may be in competition.
We'd probably do things a bit differently if we started from scratch. As things are, D's strings have a couple of quirks but are very apt for good and efficient string manipulation where index computation in the code unit realm is combined with the range of code points realm. I suppose people who have an understanding of UTF don't have difficulty using D's strings. Above all, alea jacta est and there's little we can do about that save for inventing a time machine.
Andrei
