Luke Palmer wrote:
>> limited access to system settings.
>> And in those kinds of corporate environments, you're not going to be
>> working with any code but code written in-house. Which means that
>> nobody is going to be using Latin-1, and everyone will be using the
>> ASCII synonyms. What's the problem?
Dave Whipp wrote:
> My experience is that this isn't true: we use lots of external code,
> but I still need to file requests with IT to get system-settings changed.
Right. We rely on Perl libraries from CPAN, and elsewhere. You
have to make sure that the code you are looking at is transfered
via utf-8 aware systems only. It is not safe that we decide to
use ASCII synonyms ourselves. We have to be sure that all the
modules, which happen to have Unicode sigils/ops, should be
installed without intervening legacy systems.
Explanation of the situation in Japan follows. Those who are not
interested in Japan can skip. Seemingly this problem is very unique
to Japan.
(It's already one year since yen sign became zip-operator.
This is not to kick an argument, just a whining of mine. :P)
The problem doesn't reside in writing code but in carrying files.
- You cannot tell whether a text file is in US-ASCII, utf8,
or ShiftJIS, when all the code points are below 0x7f. It
is too late when you receive a code snippet from your
colleague by mail.
- If we convert yen from Latin-1 (0xa5) to Unicode
(utf8=c2a5), then to "the default coding system, which is
believed to be ASCII but actually ShiftJIS", it becomes
0x5c. There's no way to tell whether the byte was a
bachslash or a yen at the beginning.
Grepping for yen signs doesn't help because at the time you run
grep, they are already backslashes.
If we find a lot of yen signs as zip-operators in the standard
library, Japanese would have a big question: "Give up either
Perl6 or Windows. Which do we need?" And I suppose the answer
would be "We have a lot of substitutes to Perl6: Ruby, Perl5,
etc."
In <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Larry wrote:
> (Of course, we'll leave out the little problem that half the people
> in Japan would read it as a backslash wannabe...that's not really
> a problem since a zipper would only be used where an operator is
> expected, and backslash is illegal there (so far).)
It is not the people who read a yen as a backslash, but the
legacy systems. We might define backslash as a synonym for the
zip op, but it's too risky. "Yen as zip" has the same magnitude
of risk in Japan.
--
Kaoru Maeda
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
