Swift string handling

[davidbp]

@ScottPJones

Currently, Swift has much better support for string handling than Julia (something I’m working to change in my spare time, I strongly feel that in the future, Julia could have the best (in terms of features, ease of use and performance) string handling support of any language).

It is quite important for many NLP aplications to have fast string processing. Checking if a word starts with capital if ends with “ing” etc… It is paramount for NLP. Specially for production systems where you can’t assume there is “a dictionary of correct words” mapped to integers. There are spelling mistakes, “joinedwords” etc…