Why are String offsets so complicated?

[taylorswift]

@jrose

There's something to be said also about "get the third character of my name" not actually being useful. I'm not saying Swift's String APIs are perfect, or even that they've got all the basics needed for processing formatted text, cause they definitely don't. But I am saying that the sorts of things where you know the number of Characters beforehand—Characters, rather than UTF-8 bytes or UTF-16 code units—often turn out to be contrived in practice. (Unfortunately, those contrived examples are often the "fun programming challenges" that get shared around, and so Swift suffers in the comparison.)

just saying, the upcoming Integer-convertible character literals proposal should make a lot of these problems moot. Usually when you want to get the nth character in a string, it's a specially formatted ASCII string like MM/DD/YYYY which are much better represented as [UInt8] (or even a tuple or fixed size array, if we ever get those) instead of String. Then you could write things like

if datestring[6 ..< 10] == ['1', '9', '8', '9'] 
{
    print("i was born in 1989!")
}