String != [Char]

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Freddie Manners <f.manners at gmail.com> wrote:
> To add my tuppence-worth on this, addressed to no-one in particular:
>
> (1) I think getting hung up on UTF-8 correctness is a distraction here.  I
> can't imagine anyone suggesting that the C/C++ standards removed support for
> (char*) because it wasn't UTF-8 correct: sure, you'd recommend people use a
> different type when it matters, but the language standard itself shouldn't
> be driven by technical issues that don't affect most people most of the
> time.  I'm sure it's good engineering practice to worry about these things,
> but the standard isn't there to encourage good engineering practice.

C++ does not consider 'char*' as the type of a string.

It has a standard template std::basic_string that can be instantiated on
char (giving std::string) or encoding type (of unicode characters) char16_t,
char32_t, and wchar_t giving rise to u16string, u32string, and wstring.
It has a large number of functions to manipulate a string as a sequence
(Haskell's statu quo) or as a text thanks to an elaborated
localization machinery.

-- Gaby, back to lurking mode