On Fri, 18 Mar 2022, Raul Miller wrote:
This makes no sense to me, as an english sentence:
How can a programmer write a program to handle text if the language does
not allow text to exist?
That is nonsense. Programming is all about representation. You might as
well say: how can a programmer write a program to handle graphs if the
language does not allow graphs to exist?
I imagine it would be useful to have a mechanism which, when applied to
a character sequence, throws a runtime error if that sequence is not a
valid unicode sequence.
That is exactly the problem. There is no way to know what is 'valid',
because the language has no idea what is represented by a 1-byte
character. So it guesses, and makes different guesses in different
contexts, depending on what is most convenient.
-E
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
