Well, I still like the _concept_ of an "internal character set" instead of using ISO8859-1, or CP-037, or ???? . Personally, if it were me, I'd be looking at UTF-8 for internal coding. And somehow address the lexicographical sorting / comparison (if that's the proper phrase - I'll defer to others if I'm wrong) using some sort of locale information. Each "I/O definition" would define the locale of the external representation. This would determine how to transform it to/from the internal UTF-8 representation. It might even be nice if the language had a "string" data type which has the encoded locale of the data for that instance of the string value. Said locale [cw]ould be inherited when the string was read from an external source, or assigned from another string. I don't know what to do if, when writing, the locale of the data in the string did not equal the locale of the data stream, perhaps an exception should be thrown.
OTOH, we could simply do the political thing and continue to punt the problem down the time stream, using ad-hoc solutions in the present. On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Paul Gilmartin <paulgboul...@aim.com>wrote: > On Mon, 28 Oct 2013 08:26:31 -0500, John McKown wrote: > > >Although many will likely disagree, I rather like that Java decided on > >using Unicode internally for all character data. The I/O subsystem > >translates that to the "native" encoding on input and output. > > > No, Java decided to use a 16-bit subset of Unicode internally, with > attendant, sometimes unpleasant, consequences. > > -- gil > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > -- This is clearly another case of too many mad scientists, and not enough hunchbacks. Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
