At 01:46 PM 9/21/2001 +0100, Donal K. Fellows wrote:
>Paul Prescod <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > In principle I have nothing against a multi-character set system but I
> > have a sense that the details are going to be extremely hairy and I'm
> > afraid that maybe those details will bubble up to the programmer and
> > make the usage model harder than on VMs that standardize (essentially
> > every other VM in the world!).
>
>The problem is likely to come whenever you try to link in a foreign
>module to the code. At that point, either every time a string goes
>into or out of that code it is going to have to be (possibly)
>converted into some other encoding, or that code itself is going to
>have to understand that the representation is not a constant thing and
>have the ability to adapt to handle whatever is thrown at it.
The change in encoding and character sets shouldn't be that big a deal. I'm
not, at the moment, worried about it. That may change if it turns out to be
a performance issue.
>Fixing the internal representation makes extension[*] writers' lives
>much easier.
The interface extension writers see will allow them to specify what format
they want the data in, so that's not much of a problem. Besides, that's
ease for the extension writer at the expense of ease for the person using
the extension.
Worst case we have what we have now--extensions that only work with ASCII,
or Unicode, and are utterly useless to folks using something else. Best
case we have extensions that work in more places. Since the worst case is
as good as we have now and the best case is better I consider it a win.
Part of my job is to make sure the API to the interpreter is such that
there's no pain to speak of for the folks writing extensions.
>(I don't see why script programmers should ever see what encoding is
>being used internally.
They shouldn't. If their input data's Shift-JIS encoded then things ought
to just work for 'em... :)
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
