On 26 November 2012 14:13, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 26, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Daniel James <dnljms@gmail.com> wrote:
A string isn't the same thing as a range of characters.
Why?
Strings are one of the most important types in programming, and they're usually handled differently from ranges. A string is essentially a thing, not a sequence of things. Using a range confuses the string's representation for its type. A range of characters can be binary data, or a collection of small integers, I don't want them coming anywhere near string handling code, and in C++ the type system is the best way to handle that. It should be easy to have distinct overloads for strings and ranges.
is not implicitly convertible from other string types then it is useless for use cases I pointed out. The thing is to make interfaces transparently support any string types.
That's why I suggested a customisation mechanism. Something would allow you to indicate that a third party type is a string and, if necessary, how to get a string_ref from it. Perhaps an ADL hook, or a template class that is specialized for strings, or something else entirely.
That would mean that the range is limited to strings only.
Not at all, you could still explicitly convert to a string_ref.