The D Programming Language

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2327 at umd5.umd.edu> chris at trantor.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes:
>>Another thing that should go is the assumption that the unit of storage is
>>the byte.
>I thought about this; it gets sticky, and I am still unsure.  C's
>structure bitfields are the wrong way to get at bits; in particular,
>it would be nice to have arrays of bits.  But the basic unit of
>storage has a way of creeping into the rest of the language, no
>matter how hard one attempts to keep them apart.

It isn't that bad, really -- I once went through an earlier C dpANS
and identified all the changes necessary to support a distinction
between "byte" (smallest accessible storage unit, which could be a
bit if you wanted to make it so) and "character" (smallest unit of
text).  The particular type names I used were "short char" and "char",
respectively.  It turned out that it wasn't too difficult to make
the distinction.  The idea lost out to the "multi-byte character"
approach embodied in the current draft, which is a pity since that
doesn't support bit addressability and it requires specific calls
to convert MBC sequences to and from textual units (wchar_t).  If
you guys really are planning on developing the language D, I hope
you'll consider something along these lines.  By the way, if that
becomes a real project, it should get its own mailing list; there's
too many suggestions for changes to C in this newsgroup already..