> Do you honestly believe Yes. Anyone who comes to Rust expecting there to be a .len() method on strings has demonstrated that they fundamentally misunderstand what strings are. Correcting them will be a learning experience, to their benefit.
> more verbose, annoying, unconventional names I prefer to think of them as "more explicit, clear, self-documenting names". Code readers will also benefit from the reduced ambiguity, even if the code authors are burdened with typing an onerous five additional keystrokes. On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 4:38 PM, Kevin Ballard <ke...@sb.org> wrote: > On May 28, 2014, at 1:26 PM, Benjamin Striegel <ben.strie...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > Unicode is not a simple concept. UTF-8 on the other hand is a pretty > simple concept. > > I don't think we can fully divorce these two ideas. Understanding UTF-8 > still implies understanding the difference between code points, code units, > and grapheme clusters. If we have a single unadorned `len` function, that > implies the existence of a "default" length to a UTF-8 string, which is a > lie. It also *fails* to suggest the existence of alternative measures of > length of a UTF-8 string. Finally, the choice of byte length as the default > length metric encourages the horrid status quo, which is the perpetuation > of code that is tested and works in ASCII environments but barfs as soon as > anyone from a sufficiently-foreign culture tries to use it. Dedicating > ourselves to Unicode support does us no good if the remainder of our API > encourages the depressingly-typical ASCII-ism that pervades nearly every > other language. > > > Do you honestly believe that calling it .byte_len() will do anything > besides confusing anyone who expects .len() to work, and resulting in code > that looks any different than just using .byte_len() everywhere people use > .len() today? > > Forcing more verbose, annoying, unconventional names on people won't > actually change how they process strings. It will just confuse and annoy > them. > > -Kevin >
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