[swift-evolution] InternalString class for easy String manipulation

[Magnus Ahltorp]

> 18 Aug. 2016 07:40 Félix Cloutier via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
>> In Félix’s case, I would expect to have to ask for a mail-friendly representation of his name, just like you have to ask for a filesystem-friendly representation of a filename regardless of what the internal representation is. Just because you are using UTF-8 as the internal format, it does not mean that universal support is guaranteed.
> 
> Would you imagine if "n" turned out to be poorly supported by systems throughout the world and dead-serious people argued that it's too hard for beginners?
> 
> "Filesystem-friendly" and "email-friendly" names are not backed by modern standards. You can have essentially any character that you like in a file name save for the directory separator on almost every platform out there (except on Windows, but the constraints are implemented in a layer above NTFS), and addresses like félix at ... are RFC-legal. Restrictions are merely wished into existence by programmers who don't want to complicate their mental model of text processing, to everyone else's detriment.

Also, until quite recently "filesystem-friendly" meant "only uppercase characters" and that only 8 (or on some systems only 6) characters could be used. Maybe these ASCII proponents want us to write everything in uppercase as well? And limit our identifiers to 6 characters. Now there's a proposal I can get behind!

FUNC HLOWRL(S: STRING) -> STRING {
    RETURN "HELLO, WORLD: \(S)" 
}

Or, to take your example with "n" not being supported ("m" is pretty close both phonetically and graphically):

FUMC HLOWRL(S: STRIMG) -> STRIMG {
    RETURM "HELLO, WORLD: \(S)" 
}

Still readable, right? And very easy for beginners.

/Magnus