On Wednesday, 7 June 2017 at 10:58:06 UTC, Mike B Johnson wrote:
Why not alias string so that one can easily switch from the old
string or wstring, etc?
e.g., rename string internally to sstring or whatever.
then globally define
alias string = sstring;
Which can be over realiased to wstring to affect the whole
program
alias string = wstring;
Or use a command line to set it or whatever makes you happy.
I'm in the progress of converting a large source code database
to use the above technique so we can move to using wstring...
it is not fun. Most code that works with a string should with
any string encoding, so it shouldn't matter. Making D string
agnostic(after all, the only main different in 99% of programs
is the space they take up).
If you are worried about it causing subtle bugs, then don't...
because those same bugs would occur if one manually had to
switch.
By designing techniques to use strings that are agnostic of
there internal representation should save a lot of headache.
For those few cases that it matters, simple static analysis
works fine.
I should mention, that with such a design, strings can default to
the string type, whatever it would be.
e.g.,
"this is a string"
depends on the "alias". If it is sstring then it is an sstring,
if it is wstring then it is a wstring.
Anything that returns a string will return it depend on the
alias, even templated functions such as
foreach(name; AliasSeq!(X.tupleof.stringof))
in which, generally makes name a sstring. (I suppose due to
stringof returning an sstring regardless).
