On 2010/06/05 15:38, William_J_G Overington wrote:
I feel that the encoding of a portable interpretable object code into
Unicode could be an infrastructural step forward towards great
possibilities for the future.
And yet you have not managed to list a single merit of your portable,
interpretable object code. Neither in the draft spec, which really
didn't explain anything about what was proposed, nor on this mailing list.
The possibility for viruses was mentioned, too. Personally I don't see
the merits of your idea. You can exchange ASM-style code in a text file
or binary file and interpret that within your application if you like.
Especially you said at one point it was going to solve globalization issues:
On 2010/06/02 11:51, William_J_G Overington wrote:
The portable interpretable object code is intended to be a system to
use to program software packages to solve problems of software
globalization, particularly in relation to systems that use software
to process text.
I actually looked into your draft. It pretty much encodes some assembler
commands and some basic commands for program flow. It doesn't really
offer any insights into this either. You can draw images and text in
most applications just fine, even specifying font and color. Besides the
proposed putpixel method being very slow, there seems no additional
merit to portable, interpretable object code. Indeed, it seems to create
much overhead in any application that would incorporate it.
The whole issue with viruses and sandboxing seems problematic at best.
Suddenly many programs would have to skim through all text they receive
so they don't show a big swastika when opening mail from strangers for
example.
It really seems you want to stretch plain text beyond what it is
currently ― apparently with no benefit for software programmers
whatsoever. Hence, I wouldn't want it encoded either, simply because it
doesn't seem to be a good idea at all.
Robert
