Re: Unicode in source code. WHY?

From: G. Adam Stanislav (adam@whizkidtech.net)
Date: Wed Jul 21 1999 - 16:54:09 EDT


On Tue, Jul 20, 1999 at 10:57:31PM -0700, Jonathan Rosenne wrote:
> We also know that those environments that do allow the use of Unicode are
> not all compatible. I see two main problems:
>
> 1. Should the full Unicode repertoire be allowed, or just a subset?

Why is that a problem? 8-bit bytes should be allowed without question.
That allows all of non-ASCII Unicode, including punctuation, quotation
marks, and everything else, UTF-8 encoded. We would finally be able to
use non-blanking space instead of the underscore kludge.

UTF-8 encoding makes the various environments compatible.

> 2. When are two identifiers to be considered equivalent?

When they consist of the same sequence of bytes. That would certainly work
for case-sensitive languages. Case-insensitive languages would need to
rely on the operating system to make the comparison.

Adam



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