Beman Dawes wrote:
At 08:36 PM 11/11/2004, Peter Dimov wrote:
Anything besides path/wpath is even less useful than basic_string that >isn't string or wstring, amazing as this may be, and we all know how >popular basic_string is.
The issue isn't the popularity of basic_string. As long as there are even a few users who depend on basic_strings other than string and wstring, the committee will probably want to support it.
Also, remember that basic_string<char16_t> and basic_string<char32_t> may well be mandated in the fairly close future.
I agree and have also attempted to make this point before, particularly in comp.std.c++. It is certainly possible that other native character types will be added to C++ in the future. Perhaps also some sort of unicode character encoding as has been discussed in another thread. Surely it must be easier to use the C++ template to create strings using a new character type than to tack on more functionality to a generalized string class that must accomodate all future character types.