Reply to Jarrett,
On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Justin<[email protected]> wrote:I was writing some unittests when I ran across some rather unexpected behavior in which strings in an array were being trimmed to the length of the first element. Running this program: import std.stdio; void main() { auto strings = ["hello", "cruelly", "innovative", "world"]; writefln(strings); } produces this: [[h,e,l,l,o],[c,r,u,e,l],[i,n,n,o,v],[w,o,r,l,d]] as the compiler decides to make the strings variable an array of char[5u]. The problem is easily avoided by replacing auto with string[], but the problem caught me off guard while working in the one place where I regularly use auto: unittests. Is there a reason that the compiler makes the assumptions it does or is this a bug? I did try searching the bugzilla with a few different queries, but failed to turn up anything that looked likely.There's two annoying things going on here: 1) The type of string literals is not char[], it's char[n] where n is the length of the string. I don't know why this is. 2) With array literals, the compiler simply determines the type of the array as being a dynamic array of the type of the first element, rather than making it an array of the common type of all the elements. That being said I have no idea why the compiler is allowing "cruelly", which is of type char[7], to be implicitly converted to char[5]. I thought that was not legit.
the solution is to use auto strings = ["hello"[], "cruelly", "innovative", "world"];
