Re: Caret

On 11/12/2012 7:13 AM, David Starner wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 4:39 AM, Julian Bradfield
> <jcb+unicode_at_inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Again, it depends. A user-oriented editor will treat é as a single
>> unit anyway, for text manipulations. In my programmer-oriented editor,
>> when the cursor is on e or ́, the two codepoints are displayed
>> separately instead of combined, so again there is no ambiguity.
> What do non-English speaking programmers do? It seems that if I spoke
> good Hindi or Arabic and little to no English, it would be deeply
> frustrating to try and use comments and strings in such an editor.
>
As a programmer, you do want to be able to edit *and view* strings as
sequences of code units. Doing so only in the contest of binary memory
dumps gets tedious. (In English, this means, for example, being able to
view whitespace easily - a task that too many editors make hard).

For typing comments and strings, the display would not be an issue,
because any partial characters would be handled the same way as in
regular word processing. Editing the middle of a word might be
different, but smarter editors could turn that feature off for comments.
For strings it's something you'd want more often - depends a bit on what
programs you are writing.

When inspecting strings I certainly would want to be able to distinguish
between precomposed and decomposed e-accent, and whether I know English
gots nothing to do with it.

A./
Received on Mon Nov 12 2012 - 22:25:12 CST