On Friday, February 07, 2014 20:43:38 Dmitry Olshansky wrote: > 07-Feb-2014 20:29, Andrej Mitrovic пишет: > > On Friday, 7 February 2014 at 16:27:35 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > >> Add a bugzilla and let's define isValid that returns bool! > > > > Add std.utf.decode() to that as well. IOW, it should have an overload > > which returns a status code > > Much simpler - it returns a special dchar to designate bad encoding. And > there is one defined by Unicode spec.
Isn't that actually worse? Unless you're suggesting that we stop throwing on decode errors, then functions like std.array.front will have to check the result on every call to see whether it was valid or not and thus whether they should throw, which would mean extra overhead over simply having decode throw on decode errors. validate has no business throwing, and we definitely should add isValidUnicode (or isValid or whatever you want to call it) for validation purposes. Code can then call that to validate that a string is valid and not worry about any UTFExceptions being thrown as long as it doesn't manipulate the string in a way that could result in its Unicode becoming invalid. However, I would argue that assuming that everyone is going to validate their strings and that pretty much all string-related functions shouldn't ever have to worry about invalid Unicode is just begging for subtle bugs all over the place IMHO. You're essentially dealing with error codes at that point, and I think that experience has shown quite clearly that error codes are generally a bad way to go. Almost no one checks them unless they have to. I think that having decode throw on invalid Unicode is exactly what it should be doing. The problem is that validate shouldn't. - Jonathan M Davis
