On 11/12/2003 09:05, Michael (michka) Kaplan wrote:
From: "Peter Kirk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Here I disagree. As an application programmer writing for example some
kind of linguistic application, it is totally irrelevant to me how much
actual storage a string takes. Such things should be hidden away from me
by several levels of system software and compilers. An application
programmer doesn't even need to know what this concept means! Seriously!
Beginners, even young children, can be taught simple programming and
string handling without knowing anything about bits and bytes, certainly
without having to know whether the e acute they just typed is stored as
one byte or two.
I think you are mostly mistaken here. All of the programmers I know (i.e.
script kiddies need not apply? <grin>) call APIs. The bulk of those APIs
deal with APIs that have no notion of any of this. They take LPWSTR or WCHAR
* and a developer who does not know what those are or who incorrectly
assumes that they are grapheme clusters will not be able to function very
effectively.
This looks like an API written for programmers who are computer science
graduates rather than one for beginners. Of course the CS graduates have
a vested interest in making programming into a black art that only they
can understand. But there are plenty of high level languages around,
even Visual Basic, which manage to hide from the programmers all notions
of memory allocation. I would hope that a Unicode version, do I mean
Visual Basic.Net?, will continue to hide such things and have a string
type which allows users to work without needing to distinguish
canonically equivalent forms.
Just as people can and do learn to drive cars without
knowing anything about the nuts and bolts or how the engine works.
I think this is more like knowing how to fill the car with gas than knowing
innards. Most programmers (even ones who DO deal with graphene clusters)
need to be working below the level to which you are referring here.
Only because the tools they are given to work with are not doing the job
of hiding these innards. Anyway, who needs to know how to fill their car
with gas when there are people who will do it for you? In some countries
there still are!
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
