On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 5:42 AM, Josh Grams <j...@qualdan.com> wrote:
> On 2012-03-13 02:13PM, Julian Leviston wrote: > >What is "text"? Do you store your "text" in ASCII, EBCDIC, SHIFT-JIS or > >UTF-8? If it's UTF-8, how do you use an ASCII editor to edit the UTF-8 > >files? > > > >Just saying' ;-) Hopefully you understand my point. > > > >You probably won't initially, so hopefully you'll meditate a bit on my > >response without giving a knee-jerk reaction. > > OK, I've thought about it and I still don't get it. I understand that > there have been a number of different text encodings, but I thought that > the whole point of Unicode was to provide a future-proof way out of that > mess. And I could be totally wrong, but I have the impression that it > has pretty good penetration. I gather that some people who use the > Cyrillic alphabet often use some code page and China and Japan use > SHIFT-JIS or whatever in order to have a more compact representation, > but that even there UTF-8 tools are commonly available. > > So I would think that the sensible thing would be to use UTF-8 and > figure that anyone (now or in the future) will have tools which support > it, and that anyone dedicated enough to go digging into your data files > will have no trouble at all figuring out what it is. > > If that's your point it seems like a pretty minor nitpick. What am I > missing? > Julian's point, AFAICT, is that text is just a class of storage that requires appropriate viewers and editors, doesn't even describe a specific standard. Thus, another class that requires appropriate viewers and editors can work just as well - spreadsheets, tables, drawings. You mention `data files`. What is a `file`? Is it not a service provided by a `file system`? Can we not just as easily hide a storage format behind a standard service more convenient for ad-hoc views and analysis (perhaps RDBMS). Why organize into files? Other than penetration, they don't seem to be especially convenient. Penetration matters, which is one reason that text and filesystems matter. But what else has penetrated? Browsers. Wikis. Web services. It wouldn't be difficult to support editing of tables, spreadsheets, drawings, etc. atop a web service platform. We probably have more freedom today than we've ever had for language design, if we're willing to stretch just a little bit beyond the traditional filesystem+text-editor framework. Regards, Dave
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