On 12/30/2011 7:30 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Yes, diligent programmers will generally find such problems, but with the current scheme, it's _so_ easy to use length when you shouldn't, that it's pretty much a guarantee that it's going to happen.
I'm not so sure about that. Timon Gehr's X macro tried to handle UTF-8 correctly, but it turned out that the naive version that used [i] and .length worked correctly. This is typical, not exceptional.
This was definitely not true of older multibyte schemes, like Shift-JIS (shudder), but those schemes ought to be terminated with extreme prejudice. But it definitely will take a long time to live down the bugs and miasma of code that had to deal with them. C and C++ still live with that because of their agenda of backwards compatibility. They still support EBCDIC, after all, that was obsolete even in the 70's. And I still see posts on comp.moderated.c++ that say "you shouldn't write string code like that, because it won't work on EBCDIC!" Sheesh!
