> > Yes, leaving lots of confusion. Am I allowed to use combing characters
> > in conforming Java variable names? Will they link to precomposed
> > characters? The specification says "Don't know".
>
> That's one issue that always surprises me a bit. Java is a programming
> language and, as such, I don't care if I can only write variable names
> in 7-bit ASCII. After all, all the keywords are English. The only place
> in the source where one really needs Unicode support is in strings and
> chars (hard-coded). The language in which I write my program is one
> thing, the languages/scripts it can deal with is what I worry about.
Maybe you don't care, but I do. Java is a wonderful language just because
it is the only one of the great internationally used programming languages
that allow me to use names on variables and routines in my own language!
C++ and others should follow Javas lead and allow non ascii in variables and
routine names.
So a standard is needed for handling non ascii in names in programming languages
too, and Java has selected the Unicode subset of ISO 10646 which is good enough.
Unfortunately the URL-world has not yet agreed of how to send non ascii in
URLs so starting Java over WWW may fail because the client and www-server do
not agree in how to encode non ascii.
>
> > VERY lonely and really miss the company of others offering software with
> > UTF-8 support.
>
> Speaking of which, I just went thru a book on JDK 1.1. How does one
> write UTF-8 in Java? All I can see are the DataInput- and OutputStreams.
> If I understand right, they can read/write strings in UTF-8, but assume
> a two-byte length before each. Not quite plain-text files.
The have something called "character streams" which have readers and writers
that can read/write different encodings. They will probably do what you want,
but I have not looked through all documentation.
Regards,
Dan
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