The man main complication for compatibility is indexing.
See
http://macchiati.blogspot.com/2012/07/unicode-string-models-many-programming.html
If you look back about a year in this list's archive you'll find a long
discussion.
{phone}
On Dec 21, 2012 9:34 PM, "Chris Angelico" <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Erik Arvidsson
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 6:45 PM, Chris Angelico <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >
> >> There is an alternative. Python (as of version 3.3) has implemented a
> >> new Flexible String Representation, aka PEP-393; the same has existed
> >> in Pike for some time. A string is stored in memory with a fixed
> >> number of bytes per character, based on the highest codepoint in that
> >> string - if there are any non-BMP characters, 4 bytes; if any
> >> U+0100-U+FFFF, 2 bytes; otherwise 1 byte. This depends on strings
> >> being immutable (otherwise there'd be an annoying string-copy
> >> operation when a too-large character gets put in), which is true of
> >> ECMAScript. Effectively, all strings are stored in UCS-4/UTF-32, but
> >> with the leading 0 bytes elided when they're not needed.
> >
> > This is how most VMs already work.
> >
> > I agree with you that it would be a better world if this was the case
> > but I don't hear you suggesting how we might be able to change this
> > without breaking the web?
>
> Why, if that's how it's already being done, can't there be an easy way
> to expose it to the script that way? Just flip the Big Red Switch and
> suddenly be fully Unicode-safe? Yes, it's backward-incompatible, but
> if the script can have some kind of marker (like "use strict") to show
> that it's compliant, or if the engine can simply be told "be
> compliant", we could begin to move forward. Otherwise, we're stuck
> where we are.
>
> Chris Angelico
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>
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