Am 14.01.2011 15:34, schrieb Steven Schveighoffer: > > Is it common to have multiple modifiers on a single character? The > problem I see with using decomposed canonical form for strings is that > we would have to return a dchar[] for each 'element', which severely > complicates code that, for instance, only expects to handle English. > > I was hoping to lazily transform a string into its composed canonical > form, allowing the (hopefully rare) exception when a composed > character does not exist. My thinking was that this at least gives a > useful string representation for 90% of usages, leaving the remaining > 10% of usages to find a more complex representation (like your Text > type). If we only get like 20% or 30% there by making dchar the > element type, then we haven't made it useful enough. > I'm afraid that this is not a proper way to handle this problem. It may be better for a language not to 'translate' by default. If the user wants to convert the codepoints this can be requested on demand. But pemature default conversion is a subltle way to lose information that may be important. Imagine we want to write a tool for dealing with the in/output of some other ignorant legacy software. Even if it is only text files, that software may choke on some converted input. So i belive that it is very importent that we are able to reproduce strings in exact that form in which we have read them in.
Gerrit
