Pavel Vozenilek wrote:
"Thorsten Ottosen" wrote:
In php, there is not a single member functions in a string, and all string processing is done with free-standing functions. In general I find strings in php easy to work with:
Other scipting languages have /very/ powerful strings and present this as a major feature.
Borland C+ uses fat string and every GUI framework on the planet had ctrated their own string to deal with insufficiency of std::string (in their own words).
In their own words is right. The std::string implementation is much better than Borland's AnsiString, Microsoft's CString, .NET's System.String, java.lang.string and nearly any other string class I have ever seen and used. The insufficiency is the other way around as far as the design goes. Almost all of the other string classes have no orthogonality, and a set of minimilistic functions which leave programmers groping for the correct sequence of basic manipulations when they have to do more complicated string manipulations. Only the std::string class has the richness to provide for a very large set of basic string manipulations at any point in a string for any length in an orthogonal way. No one in their right mind would prefer, for example, Borland's AnsiString to std::string as far as the basic string interface goes. What some of these other string classes have is other specialized functionality, which std:;string lacked, and Jeff is just bringing these in to a super string class from Boost's own regex and string_algo libraries. I see nothing wrong with that as a simplification in a single class of other functionality. I pointed out what I thought was the only bad design decision in std::string, but it's a done deal already and the mavens of C++ evidently want to support C idioms for the life of the language so who am I to object. Other than that, the much-maligned design of std::string is actually excellent, but that shouldn't stop anyone else from adding new functionality to a derived class and jeff has elegantly done so. Thanks Jeff !