On 12/31/2011 01:15 PM, Don wrote:
On 31.12.2011 01:56, Timon Gehr wrote:
On 12/31/2011 01:12 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
On 12/30/11 6:07 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
alias std.string.representation raw;
I meant your implementation is incomplete.
It was more a sketch than an implementation. It is not even type safe
:o).
But the main point is that presence of representation/raw is not the
issue.
The availability of good-for-nothing .length and operator[] are
the issue. Putting in place the convention of using .raw is hardly
useful within the context.
D strings are arrays. An array without .length and operator[] is close
to being good for nothing. The language specification is quite clear
about the fact that e.g. char is not a character but an utf-8 code unit.
Therefore char[] is an array of code units.
No, it isn't. That's the problem. char[] is not an array of char.
It has an additional invariant: it is a UTF8 string. If you randomly
change elements, the invariant is violated.
char[] is an array of char and the additional invariant is not enforced
by the language.
In reality, char[] and wchar[] are compressed forms of dstring.
.raw would return ubyte[], therefore it
would lose all type information. Effectively, what .raw does is a type
cast that will let code point data alias with integral data.
Exactly. It's just a "I know what I'm doing" signal.
No, it is a "I don't know what I'm doing" signal: ubyte[] does not carry
any sign of an additional invariant, and the aliasing can be used to
break the invariant that is commonly assumed for char[]. That was my point.
