[ This is a really dull e-mail. You can probably safely skip it. ] John Doty <j...@noqsi.com> writes:
> On Jun 28, 2011, at 4:17 AM, Peter Brett wrote: > >> 1) We need to support gnetlist backends when gEDA is compiled against >> Guile 1.8.x, which doesn't understand UTF-8. BTW, if you want to use >> non-ASCII characters in your attributes, I highly recommend to use >> Guile 2.x. > > Actually, UTF-8 attributes (names and values) work fine with Guile > 1.8-based gEDA. The clever design of UTF-8 makes code intended for > ASCII "just work" so long as it doesn't need to pick wide characters > out of a string. Let me spell it out: Guile 1.8.x does not understand UTF-8, which means the vast majority of standard Scheme string functions don't work according to the RnRS specifications [1]. Guile 2.x does understand UTF-8, which means that all standard Scheme string functions work according to the RnRS specifications. If you are moderately careful, you can use Guile 1.8.x without running into string encoding problems [2]. If you use Guile 2.x, you won't run into string encoding problems. Therefore, I *recommend* that if you wish to use non-ASCII Unicode in your schematics or symbols, you should upgrade to using Guile 2.x. Mainly because then things *will* actually "just work". I hope that's clear enough for everybody. Peter [1] N.b. I do not necessarily mean that "they don't work". I *do* mean that you can quite efficiently generate invalid UTF-8 that makes apps barf and people who triage bug reports cry. Luckily, most gnetlist backends don't use anything other than string=?, format and string-append, which have no issues. [2] Believe me, string encoding problems are incredibly tedious. -- Peter Brett <pe...@peter-b.co.uk> Remote Sensing Research Group Surrey Space Centre _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user