On 12/31/11 10:47 AM, Sean Kelly wrote:
I don't know that Unicode expertise is really required here anyway. All one has to know is that UTF8 is a multibyte encoding and built-in string attributes talk in bytes. Knowing when one wants bytes vs characters isn't rocket science. That said, I'm on the fence about this change. It breaks consistency for a benefit I'm still weighing. With this change, the char type will still be a single byte, correct? What happens to foreach on strings?
Clearly this is a what-if debate. The best level of agreement we could ever reach is "well, it would've been nice... sigh". It's possible that we'll define a Rope type in std.container - a heavy-duty string type with small string optimization, interning, the works. That type may use insights we are deriving from this exchange. Andrei
