On 18/10/2015 14:01, Nick Wellnhofer wrote:
- Make `Find` return a size_t.
Requires special value for "not found".
Hmm, that's a toughie. If the sentinel is SIZE_MAX, that might not fit in all
host numeric types.
Good point. The problem is not so much the byte size of the return type but
the fact that a host language might not support unsigned integers. Maybe we
should limit string sizes to SSIZE_MAX and make `Find` return an ssize_t. But
this requires to emulate the ssize_t type on non-POSIX platforms.
Here's another idea. Most of the time, users of Str_Find don't care about the
position of the substring and only want to know whether the substring is
contained or not. For this use case, a method like Str_Contains returning a
bool is a more appropriate interface.
If someone is interested in the exact position of the substring, it might make
more sense to return a string iterator pointing to the first occurrence of the
substring. So what about:
public bool
Contains(String *self, String *substring);
public incremented nullable StringIterator*
Find(String *self, String *substring);
Nick
