I'm a factor newbie, but I'm interested in unicode issues, so I'll try to give you an answer (I can't even find documentation on string literals and escape codes in factor)
First of all: you don't have to worry that the unicode standard will change radically: according to wikipedia we have 11 planes out of 17 unused, and even if it might arise the need for more than 17 planes, the most significant hex digit can be a 0 or a 1: thus all the points from 0x110000 to 0xFFFFFF could be used without changing the length of the unicode escapes (but again: this won't happen) About using less than 6 digits: as you saw, these escapes are also used inside strings, if the length wasn't fixed how could you discern between "\u003232" as codepoint 0x3232, unicode character ㈲ and "\u003232" as codepoint 32 followed by the string "32", that is: "232" ? If you need to express values up to codepoint FF, you can use the \x escape: "\xff" and "\u0000ff" represent the same value... but you can save to type 4 digits Python has 3 different kind of escape codes: \U is for full 32 bit (8 hex chars) codepoints, \u is for codepoints in the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane, only 4 hex chars) and there's obviously the \x byte escape as well If anything it could be argued that factor could implement something like this, it would make things marginally more complicated for people who don't yet understand details like the BMP... but could let you save 2 digits (imho having different escapes for char literals and inside string would be even murkier but without gaining any meaningful advantage ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Android is increasing in popularity, but the open development platform that developers love is also attractive to malware creators. Download this white paper to learn more about secure code signing practices that can help keep Android apps secure. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=65839951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Factor-talk mailing list Factor-talk@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/factor-talk
