3 ms·

First - a combined unicode length is definitely universally useful. Second - a grapheme length is universally useful. Third - I didn't say 'pick one definition

First - a combined unicode length is definitely universally useful. Second - a grapheme length is universally useful. Third - I didn't say 'pick one definition' - you did. A simple function which took as a parameter some kind of linguistic construct would be immensely useful in cases of choice/ambiguity. 'It's complicated' is the utterly the wrong answer as to why we 'can't have better strings'. Strings in almost every programming language were designed before Emjojis and true internationalization. If we designed them today, they would have support for dealing with most of the problems we face. And FYI - there are not infinite corner cases. They are limited, and we can develop constructs for dealing with all of them.

asveikau 8y ago
There are myriad problems today that 99% of developers couldn't be bothered to think about, but can be a source of bugs. eg. I'm going to guess every time you call tolower() have you haven't thought "I wonder what this does to Turkish I", but it's still there. An API won't fix us from having to think, and having ambiguities occasionally become bugs. (The fact that you've acknowledged the need for multiple string length functions -- I agree with it, but it also means you'll sometimes use the wrong one.) As I said in another comment, I still applaud efforts to improve the status quo.