On 12/30/11 4:01 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/30/2011 11:55 AM, Timon Gehr wrote:
Me too. I think the way we have it now is optimal.
Consider your X macro implementation. Strip out the utf.stride code and
use plain indexing - it will not break the code in any way. The naive
implementation still works correctly with ASCII and UTF-8.
That's not true for any other multibyte encoding, which is why UTF-8 is
inspired genius.
It's true for any encoding with the prefix property, such as Huffman.
Using .raw is /optimal/ because it states the assumption appropriately.
The user knows '$' cannot be in the prefix of any other symbol, so she
can state the byte alone is the character. If that were a non-ASCII
character, the assumption wouldn't have worked.
So yeah, UTF-8 is great. But it is not miraculous. We need .raw.
Andrei
