On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 12:13 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com> wrote:
I would prefer to be handling something that presents the abstraction "character string." I'm not sure exactly what that looks like, but I'm pretty sure the "individually addressable and mutable chars" part should go. I'd like to see an interface that prevents corrupting the underlying data such that it no longer represents a valid sequence of characters (or at least makes it highly unlikely that such corruption could happen accidentally). Furthermore, there are lots of string-y things I'd want to do that aren't provided—or aren't provided well—by std::string, e.g. if (s1.starts_with(s2)) {...}
Does this make more sense?
This discussion is interesting for a lot of reasons. However, I think it's time to address the root cause of the problem with strings in C++: that the way we think of strings right now is broken. Everything follows from this basic problem. It's time to call a spade a spade: std::string is not as well thought out as everybody might seem to think. I think since we've had something like 20 years to think about this problem, it's time to consider revolution instead of evolution. Immutable strings with lazy operations seem to be the most effective way to deal with strings from a design/implementation perspective. Encoding is just a matter of rendering, or in fusion/mpl parlance is a view of the data. String mutation is a concurrency hindrance, encourages bad programming practice, and is generally an overrated feature that makes designing efficient strings still revert to pointers and value twiddling. In this day and age with all the idioms in C++ we already know, we should really be thinking about changing the way people think about strings. Of course it shouldn't be as drastic as wiping out std::string from the face of all programs -- but something that allows for taking data from an std::string and becoming immutable, allowing lazy operations on it, and overall making a crazy efficient string implementation should be the goal first before we think about dealing with encodings and what not. Maybe it's time someone formalizes a string calculus and implements a string type that's worthy of being called a modern string. Going-back-to-just-watching'ly yours, -- Dean Michael Berris about.me/deanberris