> 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 a discussion, just a whining of mine. :P Ancient ISO-646 allowed variants, which substitute certain part of ASCII characters with local symbols. Currency signs were the first candidates of this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_646 This legacy convention is still alive in Japan as JIS/ShiftJIS encodings. I hope Unicode supercedes them and the "backslash-yen" confusion would disappear, but the movement is not quick enough. 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 sign as zip-operator in the standard library, we have a big question: "Give up either Perl6 or Windows. Which do we abandon?" And I suppose the answer would be "We have a lot of substitutes to Perl6: Ruby, Perl5, etc." In Japan, yes is synonym to backslash. We wish to retain this legacy. Zip-operator is far less important than regex-escape, string-escape, and take-reference operator. -- Kaoru Maeda [EMAIL PROTECTED]
