On Thursday, 18 October 2012 at 02:47:42 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 02:45:10AM +0200, bearophile wrote:
[...]
hex strings are useful, but I think they were invented in D1
when
strings were convertible to char[]. But today they are an
array of
immutable UFT-8, so I think this default type is not so useful:
void main() {
string data1 = x"A1 B2 C3 D4"; // OK
immutable(ubyte)[] data2 = x"A1 B2 C3 D4"; // error
}
test.d(3): Error: cannot implicitly convert expression
("\xa1\xb2\xc3\xd4") of type string to ubyte[]
[...]
Yeah I think hex strings would be better as ubyte[] by default.
More generally, though, I think *both* of the above lines
should be
equally accepted. If you write x"A1 B2 C3" in the context of
initializing a string, then the compiler should infer the type
of the
literal as string, and if the same literal occurs in the
context of,
say, passing a ubyte[], then its type should be inferred as
ubyte[], NOT
string.
T
IMO, this is a redundant feature that complicates the language
for no benefit and should be deprecated.
strings already have an escape sequence for specifying
code-points "\u" and for ubyte arrays you can simply use:
immutable(ubyte)[] data2 = [0xA1 0xB2 0xC3 0xD4];
So basically this feature gains us nothing.
