On 12/28/2011 10:33 PM, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
I don't think this is a problem you can solve without educating people. They
will need to know a thing or two about how UTF works to know the performance
implications of many of the "safe" ways to handle UTF strings. Further, for much
use of Unicode strings in D you can't get away with not knowing anything anyway
because D only abstracts up to code points, not graphemes. Imagine trying to
explain to the unknowing programmer what is going on when an algorithm function
broke his grapheme and he doesn't know the first thing about Unicode.
I'm not claiming to be an expert myself, but I believe D offers Unicode the
right way as it is.
I think this goes to, at some point, the language is no longer able to hide the
realities of the underlying machine. This happens with floating point (they are
NOT mathematical real numbers), integers (they overflow), etc.
Keep in mind that D already has a string type where the code points match the
characters:
dstring[]
