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Re: Unicode and Guile


From: Andy Wingo
Subject: Re: Unicode and Guile
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 15:16:08 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.4i

Sorry it's taken me a long time to reply.

On Sat, 25 Oct 2003, Stephen Compall wrote:

> Andy Wingo <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > If there is no plan, may I suggest that we move our internal
> > representation of strings to UTF-8. There's an interesting
> > introductory article written on www.joelonsoftware.com, although I
> > don't have the link ATM. This has the advantage that ASCII
> > characters up to 127 are represented the same.
> 
> I think this may be a disadvantage.  As you say, UTF-8 strings are
> still not ASCII-compatible, but that casting their data blocks to
> char* still works for ASCII strings, people might be tempted to simply
> do that, because other languages "don't matter enough to bother with
> it".

It is, however, a feasible conversion strategy. It is the approach taken
by Gtk+ and friends when they switched to Unicode. Apps don't break
(crash) in the switch, it's only that processing a multibyte string will
lead to strange things. Users will then file bugs / complain to the
author, and then things get fixed. It's a soft switch.

That said, I don't have a religious opinion on the matter.

Regards,

wingo.




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