2012/3/1 Glenn Adams <gl...@skynav.com>: > > 2012/3/1 Erik Corry <erik.co...@gmail.com> >> >> I'm not in favour of big red switches, and I don't think the >> compartment based solution is going to be workable. >> >> I'd like to plead for a solution rather like the one Java has, where >> strings are sequences of UTF-16 codes and there are specialized ways >> to iterate over them. Looking at this entry from the Unicode FAQ: >> http://unicode.org/faq/char_combmark.html#7 there are different ways >> to describe the length (and iteration) of a string. The BRS proposal >> favours #2, but I think for most applications utf-16-based-#1 is just >> fine, and for the applications that want to "do it right" #3 is almost >> always the correct solution. Solution #3 needs library support in any >> case and has no problems with UTF-16. >> >> The central point here is that there are combining characters >> (accents) that you can't just normalize away. Getting them right has >> a lot of the same issues as surrogate pairs (you shouldn't normally >> chop them up, they count as one 'character', you can't tell how many >> of them there are in a string without looking, etc.). If you can >> handle combining characters then the surrogate pair support falls out >> pretty much for free. > > > The problem here is that you are mixing apples and oranges. Although it > *may* appear that surrogate pairs and grapheme clusters have features in > common, they operate at different semantic levels entirely. A solution that > attempts to conflate these two levels is going to cause problems at both > levels. A distinction should be maintained between the following levels: > > encoding units (e.g., UTF-16 coding units) > unicode scalar values (code points) > grapheme clusters
This distinction is not lost on me. I propose that random access indexing and .length in JS should work on level 1, and there should be library support for levels 2 and 3. In order of descending usefulness I think the order is 1, 3, 2. Therefore I don't want to cause a lot of backwards compatibility headaches by prioritizing the efficient handling of level 2. > > IMO, the current discussion should limit itself to the interface between the > first and second of these levels, and not introduce the third level into the > mix. > > G. _______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list es-discuss@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss