On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Freddie Manners
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.
(I assume you mean Unicode correctness. UTF-8 is only one possible encoding. Also I'm not arguing for removing type String = [Char], I arguing why Text is better than String.) C++'s char* is morally equivalent of our ByteString, not Text. There's no standardized C++ Unicode string type, ICU's UnicodeString is perhaps the closest to one. -- Johan