Remove string [] indexing

[huonw]

It is byte indexing (not character indexing) which is encouraging poor UTF-8 hygiene, and the behaviour can be regained either with the .bytes() iterator, or just s.as_bytes() to get a &[u8] view (at zero cost).

[huonw]

nominating

[bstrie]

Seconded. In a UTF-8 world, what we think of as a "string" is emphatically not an array.

[thestinger]

+1, it's rarely correct to index strings at all, and especially not by bytes

[thestinger]

I would also be for removing the len method and using as_bytes().len() instead. Strings don't need to implement the Container trait as they're not actually a container of a specific type.

[sfackler]

+1

[pongad]

I volunteer to work on this. By the way, we do have a function to decode character points right?

[pongad]

~str in patterns seems to be blocking this. I'll try work on that and come back to this later.

[huonw]

Why would string pattern matching affect string indexing?

[pongad]

I'm not sure myself. After removing string indexing, I got "internal
compiler errors". Tracked it to #[lang=uniq_str_eq].

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Huon Wilson notifications@github.comwrote:

Why would string pattern matching affect string indexing?

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/12710#issuecomment-36810589
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[nikomatsakis]

This will probably fall out of the changes we plan for DST, or at
least could easily do so.

[pnkfelix]

Accepted for 1.0, P-backcompat-libs.