Re: What does it mean to "not be a valid string in Unicode"?

In practice and by design, treating isolated surrogates the same as
reserved code points in processing, and then cleaning up on conversion to
UTFs works just fine. It is a tradeoff that is up to the implementation.

It has nothing to do with a "legacy of C pointer arithmetic". It does
represent a pragmatic choice some time ago, but there is no need getting
worked up about it. Human scripts and their representation on computers is
quite complex enough; in the grand scheme of things the handling of
surrogates in implementations pales in significance.

Mark <https://plus.google.com/114199149796022210033>
*
*
*— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*
**

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 9:43 PM, Stephan Stiller
<stephan.stiller_at_gmail.com>wrote:

>
> Things like this are called "garbage in, garbage-out" (GIGO). It may be
>>> harmless, or it may hurt you later.
>>>
>> So in this kind of a case, what we are actually dealing with is: garbage
>> in, principled, correct results out. ;-)
>>
>
> Wouldn't the clean way be to ensure valid strings (only) when they're
> built and then make sure that string algorithms (only) preserve
> well-formedness of input?
>
> Perhaps this is how the system grew, but it seems to be that it's
> yet another legacy of C pointer arithmetic and
> about convenience of implementation
> rather than a
> safety or
> performance
> issue.
>
> Stephan
>
>
>
Received on Tue Jan 08 2013 - 00:53:34 CST