Re: Strange crash on custom iterator

[Jacob Sparre Andersen <jacob@jacob-sparre.dk>]

J-P. Rosen <rosen@adalog.fr> writes:

> !!!! I, and many others, often need to search substrings within a
> string; actually, I would have a hard time finding an example of
> string manipulation without indexing...

When you search for a substring within a string, you're typically
treating it in a very sequential manner.  Maintaining a "cursor"
pointing at the octet position in the UTF-8 encoded string would be just
as practical in most (all?) of the string processing I can remember
doing?

Counting the number of code points(?) in a string takes longer time, but
if you want the actual number of graphemes in the string,
Wide_Wide_Character is practically just as slow as a UTF-8 encoded
string.

> So, you want different types, plus a typing system that would allow to
> mix the types and make them compatible... You might as well put
> everything in the same type!

It would be nice if the encoding and character set of a string were
"implementation details".  I'm not sure how to do it, but I think it is
worth trying to find a solution for Ada.  (I think I was introduced to
how the KDE library does it once, but IIRC only encoding was abstracted
away.)

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
»Saving keystrokes is the job of the text editor, not the
 programming language.«                    -- Preben Randhol