Paul Prescod <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> In principle I have nothing against a multi-character set system but I
> have a sense that the details are going to be extremely hairy and I'm
> afraid that maybe those details will bubble up to the programmer and
> make the usage model harder than on VMs that standardize (essentially
> every other VM in the world!).
The problem is likely to come whenever you try to link in a foreign
module to the code. At that point, either every time a string goes
into or out of that code it is going to have to be (possibly)
converted into some other encoding, or that code itself is going to
have to understand that the representation is not a constant thing and
have the ability to adapt to handle whatever is thrown at it.
Fixing the internal representation makes extension[*] writers' lives
much easier.
(I don't see why script programmers should ever see what encoding is
being used internally. The only times Tcl programmers ever have a
problem is when they've got some C code that integrates with databases
that store their data in some undetermined coding - assumed to be
ISO8859-1, but really not fixed in any meaningful way - or if they've
forgotten to set the encoding for a channel and the system default
wasn't right. It comes to a couple of queries a month on c.l.t...)
Donal.
[* Or whatever they're called in your part of the world. ]
--
Donal K. Fellows, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK.
(work) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44-161-275-6137 (preferred email addr.)
(home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: +44-1274-401017 Mobile: +44-7957-298955
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~fellowsd/ (Don't quote my .sig; I've seen it before!)
