Re: [boost] Strings tagged with their character set

From: Sebastian Redl (sebastian.redl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-01-09 15:59:12

Having run into string-related problems myself in my iochain project,
I'm thinking about character encodings again. (I don't like the term
character set. It ought to mean something different from its common
usage. UTF-8 and UTF-16 aren't character sets.)

Phil Endecott wrote:
> For a UTF-8 string, my proposal offered
>
>    a mutable random-access byte iterator
>   
What is the use case for this?
> Concerning mutable vs. immutable strings: which is best in any 
> particular case clearly depends on the size of the string, the 
> operation being performed, and whether it has a variable-length 
> encoding.  The programmer should be allowed to choose which to use.  
> (An interesting case is where the size or character set changes at 
> run-time, and a run-time choice of algorithm is appropriate.)
>   
Why on earth would you change the character set of a string at runtime?

Robert O'Cahallan (roc of Mozilla) recently blogged a bit about strings.
Mozilla is a project that has a lot of experience with strings, so I put
quite some weight on his opinion.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/01/string_theory.html

Sebastian Redl