On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 07:13:23PM +0000, Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...] > - the auto-synchronization and the statelessness are big deals.
Yes. Imagine if we standardized on a header-based string encoding, and we wanted to implement a substring function over a string that contains multiple segments of different languages. Instead of a cheap slicing over the string, you'd need to scan the string or otherwise keep track of which segment the start/end of the substring lies in, allocate memory to insert headers so that the segments are properly interpreted, etc.. It would be an implementational nightmare, and an unavoidable performance hit (you'd have to copy data every time you take a substring), and the @nogc guys would be up in arms. And that's assuming we have a sane header-based encoding for strings that contain segments in multiple languages in the first place. Linguistic analysis articles, for example, would easily contain many such segments within a paragraph, or perhaps in the same sentence. How would a header-based encoding work for such documents? Nevermind the recent trend of liberally sprinkling emojis all over regular text. If every emoticon embedded in a string requires splitting the string into 3 segments complete with their own headers, I dare not imagine what the code that manipulates such strings would look like. T -- Famous last words: I *think* this will work...