On 01.05.2016 07:29, TheGag96 wrote:
Why exactly is it like this? I would understand why strings (immutable character arrays) behave like this, but I feel like plain old character arrays should work the same as an array of ubytes when treated as a range... Or is there some other string-related behavior that would get broken by this?
It's because of auto-decoding. char[] is an array of chars, but it's been made a range of dchars. Calling front on a char[] decodes up to four chars into one dchar.
Obviously you can't take the address of the dchar, because it's just a return value.
You can't assign through front, because the number of chars could be different from what's currently there. The whole array would have to be re-arranged then, which would be unexpectedly costly for the user.
The auto-decoding behavior was chosen to make dealing with char[] less bug-prone. With auto-decoding you don't have to worry about cutting a multibyte sequence in half (can still cut a grapheme cluster in half, though). However, as you see, it creates other headaches, and it's considered a mistake by many. Getting rid of it now would be a major breaking change. Could be worthwhile, though.
