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Even further, why are strings considered a linear sequence of 8-bit characters (defaulting to ASCII)? That's madness in 2014! If I give you a sequence of bytes

Even further, why are strings considered a linear sequence of 8-bit characters (defaulting to ASCII)? That's madness in 2014! If I give you a sequence of bytes and tell you it's a "string", that's no more meaningful than if I gave you a bunch of bytes and said "this is music" or "this is a picture". Without telling you the encoding you have to blindly guess how to interpret it. Go does a good job of rectifying this: strings are generally opaque binary objects--indexing into them gives you abstract "runes" (representing Unicode code points) which can then be encoded into various flavors of UTF characters.

jbooth 12y ago
I know it's a rhetorical question, but "Unicode didn't exist when C or C++ were invented" is a really good answer.
jerf 12y ago
"Go does a good job of rectifying this: strings are generally opaque binary objects--indexing into them gives you abstract "runes" (representing Unicode code points) which can then be encoded into various flavors of UTF characters." Overselling Go a bit there. Indexing into a string gives you that byte: http://play.golang.org/p/rxeexRzW7e http://play.golang.org/p/rxeexRzW7e There are ways of iterating along a string by "rune" but it's not the default. That said, given that strings in Go are assumed to be UTF-8, indexing into them by rune is expensive and if you actually want to iterate by Unicode char I'm not bothered by having to be a bit more explicit about it.
- bkeroack 12y ago
  Strictly speaking, indexing into a string gives you an integer type (as your example also shows): https://play.golang.org/p/i7_MKja_mQ https://play.golang.org/p/i7_MKja_mQ "Rune" is an alias for int32. So we are saying the same thing, essentially.
  - jerf 12y ago
    Try that with something that isn't one byte in UTF-8. It won't work. We aren't saying the same thing.
    - bkeroack 12y ago
      OK. https://play.golang.org/p/Q94GFI02ru https://play.golang.org/p/Q94GFI02ru I'm not sure what your point is in this argument? You're saying the above is worse than braindead C ASCII-only strings?
      - jerf 12y ago
        That promising that "Go strings allow you to index into them to retrieve runes" is overselling Go's string support, of course. That's why I led with that statement, since it is what I was trying to say. It's best to be correct about how languages work, because when you interest someone in a language via a false statement, they do not end up thinking highly of either you or the language when they discover the falsity. While I'm not sure I'd call myself a Go "advocate", I do prefer that people like and/or dislike it for valid reasons rather than invalid ones.

jbooth 12y ago

I know it's a rhetorical question, but "Unicode didn't exist when C or C++ were invented" is a really good answer.

jerf 12y ago

"Go does a good job of rectifying this: strings are generally opaque binary objects--indexing into them gives you abstract "runes" (representing Unicode code points) which can then be encoded into various flavors of UTF characters." Overselling Go a bit there. Indexing into a string gives you that byte: http://play.golang.org/p/rxeexRzW7e http://play.golang.org/p/rxeexRzW7e There are ways of iterating along a string by "rune" but it's not the default. That said, given that strings in Go are assumed to be UTF-8, indexing into them by rune is expensive and if you actually want to iterate by Unicode char I'm not bothered by having to be a bit more explicit about it.

bkeroack 12y ago
Strictly speaking, indexing into a string gives you an integer type (as your example also shows): https://play.golang.org/p/i7_MKja_mQ https://play.golang.org/p/i7_MKja_mQ "Rune" is an alias for int32. So we are saying the same thing, essentially.
- jerf 12y ago
  Try that with something that isn't one byte in UTF-8. It won't work. We aren't saying the same thing.
  - bkeroack 12y ago
    OK. https://play.golang.org/p/Q94GFI02ru https://play.golang.org/p/Q94GFI02ru I'm not sure what your point is in this argument? You're saying the above is worse than braindead C ASCII-only strings?
    - jerf 12y ago
      That promising that "Go strings allow you to index into them to retrieve runes" is overselling Go's string support, of course. That's why I led with that statement, since it is what I was trying to say. It's best to be correct about how languages work, because when you interest someone in a language via a false statement, they do not end up thinking highly of either you or the language when they discover the falsity. While I'm not sure I'd call myself a Go "advocate", I do prefer that people like and/or dislike it for valid reasons rather than invalid ones.