On Mon, Mar 04, 2002 at 01:59:45PM -0500, Tod Harter wrote: > It is MUCH easier to write low level code that deals with fixed width chars, > yes. This is fundamentally why i18n is such a big deal is that its a LOT > harder to reliably write algorithms that have to deal with all sorts of > different ways of representing data! One standard fundamental data type, ie > short, int, long, whatever you want to call it makes things MUCH easier. > Trust me, I've been writing software for 20+ years, I know from personal > experience!
Contrast that with the experience that it's MUCH easier to write string-handling code without anything as weird as a "char" type (think perl, think combining characters in unicode). And then consider that you get the low level code that enables "text-oriented" programming for free with every recent perl, gtk and a bunch of other libraries. The char type in programming languages should die, in its meaning as a piece of a text string. On a different note... The main subject of this discussion, the inability to know which character set is used in from submissions, is ironically "solved" by W3C using UTF-8. See http://www.w3.org/International/O-URL-and-ident.html and http://www.w3.org/International/O-URL-code.html At least the more recent W3C recommendations that use URIs make it a point to mention the use of UTF-8 explicitly. -- Bart. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
