On 8/2/12 6:54 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
So, a function which does the buffering of code units like Walter suggests is generic?
Of course, because it operates on bytes read from memory, files, or sockets etc.
It's doing something that makes no sense outside of strings.
Right. The bytes represent UTF-8 encoded strings, except their type is ubyte so there's no processing in the library.
And if it's doing that with strings and something else with everything else (which it _has_ to do if the same function is going to work with both unicode as well as range types that have nothing to do with unicode), then it's special casing strings and therefore is _not_ generic.
This is automatically destroyed because its assumption was destroyed.
Sure, you could have a function which specifically operates on ranges of code units and understands how unicode works and is written accordingly, but then that function is specific to ranges of code units and is only generic with regards to various ranges of code units. It can't operate on generic ranges like functions such as map and filter can.
Yes, and I think that's exactly what the doctor prescribed here. Andrei
