> From: Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> > Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2017 21:01:31 +0200 > Cc: guile-user@gnu.org > > UTF-8 beautifully bridges the interpretation gap between 8-bit character > strings and text. However, the interpretation step should be done in the > application and not in the programming language.
You can't do that in an environment that specifically targets sophisticated multi-lingual text processing independent of the outside locale. Unless you can interpret byte sequences as characters, you will be unable to even count characters in a range of text, let alone render it for display. And you cannot request applications to do those low-level chores. > Support libraries for Unicode are naturally welcome. Well, in that case Emacs core is one huge "support library". And I don't see why Guile couldn't be another one; it should, IMO. > Plain Unicode text is actually quite a rare programming need. It is > woefully inadequate for the human interface, which generally requires > numerous other typesetting effects. You do need "other typesetting effects", naturally, but that doesn't mean you can get away without more or less full support of Unicode nowadays. You are talking about programming, but we should instead think about applications -- those of them which need to process text, or even access files, as this discussion shows, do need decent Unicode support. E.g., users generally expect that decomposed and composed character sequences behave and are treated identically, although they are different byte-stream wise. > But is also causing unnecessary grief in the computer-computer > interface, where the classic textual naming and textual protocols > are actually cutely chosen octet-aligned binary formats. The universal acceptance of UTF-8 nowadays makes this much less of an issue, IME.