On 02/10/12 17:14, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 10/2/12 7:11 AM, Don Clugston wrote:
The problem
-----------
String literals in D are a little bit magical; they have a trailing \0.
[snip]
I don't mean to be Debbie Downer on this because I reckon it addresses
an issue that some have, although I never do. With that warning, a few
candid opinions follow.
First, I think zero-terminated strings shouldn't be needed frequently
enough in D code to make this necessary.
[snip]
You're missing the point, a bit. The zero-terminator is only one symptom
of the underlying problem: string literals and array literals have the
same type but different semantics.
The other symptoms are:
* the implicit .dup that happens with array literals, but not string
literals.
This is a silent performance killer. It's probably the most common
performance bug we find in our code, and it's completely ungreppable.
* string literals are polysemous with width (c, w, d) but array literals
are not (they are polysemous with constness).
For example,
"abc" ~ 'ü'
is legal, but
['a', 'b', 'c'] ~ 'ü'
is not.
This has nothing to do with the zero terminator.
