On 9/21/11 10:16 AM, Christophe wrote:
Timon Gehr , dans le message (digitalmars.D:144889), a écrit :
unicode natively. Yet the 'D strings are strange and confusing' argument
comes up quite often on the web.
Well, I think they are. The ptr+length stuff is amasing, but the
behavior of strings in phobos is weird.
mini-quiz: what should std.range.drop(some_string, 1) do ?
hint: what it actually does is not what the documentation of phobos
suggests*...
Strings are array of char, but they appear like a lazy range of dchar to
phobos. I could cope with the fact that this is a little unexpected for
beginners. But well, that creates a lot of exceptions in phobos, like
the fact that you can't even copy a char[] to a char[] with
std.algorithm.copy. And I don't mention all the optimization that are
not/cannot be performed for those strings. I'll just remember to use
ubyte[] wherever I can...
String handling in D is good modulo the oddities you noticed. What would
make it perfect would be:
* Add property .rep that returns byte[], ushort[], or uint[] for char[],
wchar[], dchar[] respectively (with the appropriate qualifier).
* Replace .length with .codeUnits.
* Disallow [n] and [m .. n]
This would upgrade D's strings from good to awesome. Really it would be
a dream come true. Unfortunately it would also break most D code there
is out there. I don't see how we can improve the current situation while
staying backward compatible.
Andrei
