Those are good examples! Notably, all of them are in reasonably low level, user-facing code.
Your examples are implementing custom text input boxes (Excel, Edge), line breaks while printing, and implementing a terminal application. I agree that in all of those cases, grapheme cluster segmentation is appropriate. But that doesn't make grapheme cluster based iteration "the correct way to handle strings". There's no "correct"! There are at least 3 different ways to iterate through a string, and different applications have different needs.
Good languages should make all of these options easy for programmers to use when they need them. Writing a custom input box? Use grapheme clusters. Writing a text based CRDT? Treat a string as a list of unicode codepoints. Writing an HTTP library? Treat the headers and HTML body as ASCII / opaque bytes. Etc.
I take the criticism that rust makes grapheme iteration harder than the others. But eh, rust has truly excellent crates for that within arms reach. I don't see any advantage in moving grapheme based segmentation into std. Well, maybe it would make it easier to educate idiot developers about this stuff. But there's no real technical reason. Its situationally useful - but less useful than lots of other 3rd party crates like rand, tokio and serde.
> like you, they didn't iterate over grapheme clusters. That you never use grapheme iteration might say more about you than it says about grapheme iteration being unneeded.
It says that in 30+ years of programming, I've never programmed a text input field from scratch. Why would I? That's the job of the operating system. Making my own sounds like a huge waste of time.
Your examples are implementing custom text input boxes (Excel, Edge), line breaks while printing, and implementing a terminal application. I agree that in all of those cases, grapheme cluster segmentation is appropriate. But that doesn't make grapheme cluster based iteration "the correct way to handle strings". There's no "correct"! There are at least 3 different ways to iterate through a string, and different applications have different needs.
Good languages should make all of these options easy for programmers to use when they need them. Writing a custom input box? Use grapheme clusters. Writing a text based CRDT? Treat a string as a list of unicode codepoints. Writing an HTTP library? Treat the headers and HTML body as ASCII / opaque bytes. Etc.
I take the criticism that rust makes grapheme iteration harder than the others. But eh, rust has truly excellent crates for that within arms reach. I don't see any advantage in moving grapheme based segmentation into std. Well, maybe it would make it easier to educate idiot developers about this stuff. But there's no real technical reason. Its situationally useful - but less useful than lots of other 3rd party crates like rand, tokio and serde.
> like you, they didn't iterate over grapheme clusters. That you never use grapheme iteration might say more about you than it says about grapheme iteration being unneeded.
It says that in 30+ years of programming, I've never programmed a text input field from scratch. Why would I? That's the job of the operating system. Making my own sounds like a huge waste of time.