On Jan 18, 2022, at 1:03 PM, Peter Dimov <pdimov@gmail.com> wrote:

Daveed Vandevoorde wrote:

On Jan 18, 2022, at 11:53 AM, Peter Dimov via SG7 <sg7@lists.isocpp.org>

wrote:

Daveed Vandevoorde wrote:

— The proposed metafunctions now use span and string_view instead

of

vector and string

NTCS please :-(

I'm serious. Please provide a way to obtain a `char const*` instead of
std::string_view; that could take the form of a consteval magic
function taking the std::string_view returned from the official API.

Since the compiler will not want to be married to a particular stdlib,
its internal primitives are not going to be creating std::string_views
anyway.

I missed this before.  We could return a NTCS instead: Would that be more
usable?  It’s certainly easier to implement.

It's unfortunately not more usable. With a string_view, you can write
`name_of(x) == "f"` and have it work correctly.

But on the other hand, if you have a `char const*`, it's trivial to obtain a
string_view from it, whereas the reverse... isn't.

So I can't with a clear conscience insist on changing the API to return
`char const*` because this degrades usability for simple things (even if
that doesn't occur very often outside of toy examples), but I would very
much like _some_ way of obtaining a `char const*`.