Recent discussions on the zero terminated string problems and inconsistency of string literals has me, again, wondering why D doesn't have a 'type' to represent C's zero terminated strings.  It seems to me that having a type, and typing C functions with it would solve a lot of problems.

The compiler could/would then error if people attempted to pass a D string without converting it correctly.

The compiler would create literals with or without \0 as required by the 'type' being assigned, parameter passed, etc.

The conversion function from a D string to a C string would return the new type.

A %sz format specifier could be added to writef which would be able to type check the argument.

As the only way to get a variable of the new type would be from a literal, conversion or C function call so we could be sure it was in fact \0 terminated(*), and so..

An implicit conversion between a C string and a D string (slice using strlen) would be possible, and safe.  (Though, not at zero runtime cost)

Existing (correct) code would continue to compile, by this I mean:
 - passing literals
 - calling a conversion function for each D string argument

But code which passes D string variables to C functions without conversion would start to fail to compile, so the change will 'break' existing code.

There would be several solutions in these cases:

1) add a call to a conversion function.  Introducing a conversion cost which was not previously present.

2) re-type the variable as a C string.  If it's not used for anything else then this is more "correct".  If it's passed to other code then because a C string will implicitly converts (with a slice/strlen) to a D string this substitution will work in most cases, however that act of conversion will incur a cost (but it can/should be one off if the result is assigned/kept).

I am probably missing something obvious, or I have forgotten one of the array/slice complexities which makes this a nightmare.

Thoughts?

Regan

(*) Ignoring buggy/broken C functions returning non-zero terminated strings.. as we will crash on these no matter what in any case.

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Am 02.10.2012 16:55, schrieb Regan Heath:
> Recent discussions on the zero terminated string problems and
> inconsistency of string literals has me, again, wondering why D doesn't
> have a 'type' to represent C's zero terminated strings.  It seems to me
> that having a type, and typing C functions with it would solve a lot of
> problems.

You have basically a type only used for 0-terminated strings, char*, in D you use normally string, and if you wanna represent binary data you use ubyte[], I've never used char* except for interfacing with C. I would prefer a library soulution, some kind of Struct which is implicitly convertable to char* (0-terminates) and also to string (not 0-terminated), not sure how to implement that though.