The Unicode Problem (was: [Israel.pm] First Pre-Release of Arc)

I am replying only to Hackers-IL.

The big bummer (noticed by several other people as well) is the apparent
intention to support only ASCII.

One of the bloggers suggested that it would have been better if Paul
Graham announced that he supports only octets, and let users build
Unicode libraries over the language.

I think that such languages would benefit from support for two Unicode
string representations:
1. utf-8 - strings built of octets, and each glyph occupies variable
number of octets.
2. ucs-32 (with option to change to ucs-40, ucs-48, etc. in the future)
- strings of glyphs, such that each glyph consists of a fixed number of
octets.  The basic language design needs to provide for an easy way to
enlarge the number of octets per glyph in the future.

Anything which I overlooked?

                                         --- Omer


On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 21:37 +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> Apparently Paul Graham and Co. released the first version of Arc, their new 
> dialect of Lisp:
> 
> * http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html
> * http://arclanguage.org/
> * http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2643
> 
> Here are some links to patches from the #arc topic:
> 
> <<<<<<<<
> Topic for #arc is arc support and hangout : http://www.arclanguage.org/ | 
> http://paulgraham.com/arc0.html | Improve your arc REPL - use rlwrap - 
> or 'require' readline.ss in .mzschemerc |  on windows use -d 
> mzscheme.exe -m -d arc0\as.scm | patch for newer mzschemes 
> http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=148 | patch to fix date on linux 
> http://blakeley.com/linux-date.patch
> >>>>>>>
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