Comment by zwnow

Comment by zwnow a day ago

11 replies

I actually want string length. Just give me the length of a word. My human brain wants a human way to think about problems. While programming I never think about bytes.

dwb a day ago

The whole point is that string length doesn’t necessarily give you the “length” of a “word”, and both of those terms are not well enough defined.

jibal a day ago

The point is that those terms are ambiguous ... and if you mean the length in grapheme clusters, it can be quite expensive to calculate it, and isn't the right number if you're dealing with strings as objects that are chunks of memory.

  • zwnow a day ago

    [flagged]

    • zahlman a day ago

      It is not possible to write correct code without understanding what you dismiss here.

    • tomsmeding a day ago

      If the validation rules don't specify (either explicitly or implicitly) what the "length" in the rule corresponds to (if it concerns a natural-language field, it's probably grapheme clusters), then either you should fix the rule, or you care only about checking the box of "I checked the validation rules", in which case it's a people problem and not a technology problem.

    • dwb a day ago

      You are in the wrong job if you don’t want to think about “nerd shit” while programming.

      • zwnow a day ago

        Idk it pays my bills and I have success at work so I must do something right.

int_19h 19 hours ago

Humans speak many different languages. Not all of them are English, and not all of them have writing systems which make it meaningful to talk about "string length" without disambiguating further.