On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 10:22:45AM +0200, Leopold Toetsch wrote: : Well there are three different whitespace lists. The Parrot program [1] : below shows all, including space and blank.
I suspect we'll end up with about as many whitespace definitions as there are computer languages, or maybe as many as there are programmers. Or maybe the cross product of those... The basic problem is that as we get off into the land of pragmatics, a term like "whitespace" becomes extremely context dependent. And things like zero-width spaces and non-breaking spaces can have meanings that depend contextually on the actual human language you're dealing with. The job for a language designer is to decide whether any of the default standards are good enough to serve as the default for the language, or whether we need yet another standard to choose from. :-) The other job is to make sure that, regardless of the default, it's possible to make any other choice *look* like the default within a particular lexical scope, and to cajole the language implementer into making sure it's not too much overhead to support other character classes. Larry
