In article <c99c0u$12gr$1@digitaldaemon.com>, Phill says...
>
>Roberto:
>
>Can you explain what you mean by "Real natural languages"?

"French", "Italian" ? ;-)

Ciao

> I understand where you're coming from, and this is a compelling idea, but this idea has been tried out before in Pascal. And I can say from personal experience it is one reason I hate Pascal <g>. Chars do want to be integral data types, and requiring a cast for it leads to execrably ugly expressions filled with casts. In moving to C, one of the breaths of fresh air was to not need all those %^&*^^% casts any more. Let me enumerate a few ways that chars are used as integral types:
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> 1) converting case
> 2) using char as index into a translation table
> 3) encoding/decoding UTF strings
> 4) encryption/decryption software
> 5) compression code
> 6) hashing
> 7) regex internal implementation
> 8) char value as input to a state machine like a lexer
> 9) encoding/decoding strings to/from integers
>
> in other words, routine system programming tasks. The improvement D has, however, is to have chars be a separate type from byte, which makes for better self-documenting code, and one can have different overloads for them.

<Horse state="dead" action="flog">But yet we cannot overload on single-bit integrals and boolean values!</Horse>