On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 17:11:14 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
On Thursday, 10 July 2014 at 17:01:45 UTC, Jane Doe wrote:
One thing that bothers me quite a bit is that char's do not
have length. This makes it difficult in templates that can
take either strings or chars.
While one can write a template that returns the length of a
string or char, I would imagine that this could be implemented
in the compiler more efficiently?
char.length always returns 1.
Similarly, it would be nice to be able to use [] on chars.
char[x] returns char.
Example:
auto last(T)(T s) { return s[s.length-1]; }
void main()
{
writeln(last("asdf"));
writeln(last('c')); // fails!! But surely this should
work!
}
http://dpaste.dzfl.pl/cba5a635d08e
Error: s must be an array or pointer type, not char
Error: no property 'length' for type 'char'
Basically, I see no reason why char's can't be more confluent
with strings, at least on the surface. I would reduce code
bloat/specialization for no real reason.
If the compile knows a type is a char then char.length = 1 and
char[x] = char. Shouldn't be hard or cause any problems?
It looks nice on the surface but it quite quickly unravels.
string and char are very different types: one is a single-byte
value type, the other is a 16 byte (on x64) structure
representing an arbitrary length window on to arbitrary memory.
The situations where they are interchangeable in code are the
exceptions, not the rule.
This is simply wrong. There are man types with functionality of
length. One can create a class Char that has lenght. Arrays have
length.
