Re: Unicode -- issues and recommendations

On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 09:06:11AM -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> > I would not add any additional character literals; it is sufficient to
> > use integers.
> 
> That is exceptionally North American of you. :-) Especially so when one
> stops to think just how little support is required for quoted UTF-8
> character literals:
> 
>   Lexer must use a 32-bit quantity to report the code point to
>   the parser.
> 
>   Lexer must know the UTf-8 encoding scheme, but NOT any details
>   about unicode characters beyond what it already knows.
> 
>   Range check that is already being used for integers must now also
>   be applied when the character literal is type qualified.
> 
> If this is all it takes to do Unicode character literals, then I have to
> say that NOT doing them is pretty silly. The "readable in editor"
> argument alone is sufficient to justify this level of effort.

I highly agree. mangled strings make things so much harder to debug and
it is positivly trivial to allow utf-8 in string literals. I have had to
encode/decode utf-8 in my head and then remember what symbol that
cooresponded to enough to know I don't like it.

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈