On Thursday, 17 May 2018 at 23:16:03 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 07:13:23PM +0000, Patrick Schluter via
Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
[...]
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.
[...]
That's what rtf with code pages was essentially. I'm happy that
we got rid of it and that they were replaced by xml, even if
Microsoft's document xml being a bloated, ridiculous mess, it's
still an order of magnitude less problematic than rtf (I mean at
the text encoding level).