Martin Baker wrote:
>
> Waldek,
>
> Since you are working on OutputForm, would it be possible to provide
> some common escape mechanism for unicode characters?
>
> I realise that unicode characters may not be passed through by the
> command line or lisp but if there were some acceptable escape
> character, such as,
> /Theta/
> or
> /0x1234/
> which could be embedded in strings, variable names and operator names,
> then each instance of OutputForm could translate that into its own
> format.
>
I admit that I do not understand what effect you want to get.
Simple mechanizm like "output unicode string" is problematic
as there is no way to do this on ASCII-only console (in fact
unrestricted Unicode is problematic for _all_ output formats
because most of Unicode fonts is quite incomplete). Basically
I see the following constraints:
- we need resonable fallback for non-Unicode media. Outputing
something like 'UnicodeString("0xbaab123456") where inside
double quotes is hexadecimal representation of octets is
easy, but I am affraid is not reasonable
- currently symbols names (and consequently variable names) are
Lisp strings. Moreover any legal Lisp string may serve as
variable name (and in practice convertions between strings
and variable names are quite frequent). This means that
any "escaping convention" on variable names in practice
would have to be used for all strings. If details of
escaping would be visible on user level IMHO this would
make string manipulations quite unpleasent. If details
are hidden, than we effectively get support for Unicode
strings regardless of what is provided by Lisp -- my
plan is to provide Unicode strings at Spad level, but
I hope to this simpler than via escape sequences.
For now, if needed we could add a lot of new operators (say
"full" set of TeX/LaTeX operators), here since operators
have names textual falback is easy and there is no need to
use Unicode to represent them internally.
--
Waldek Hebisch
[email protected]
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