Am 22.01.2007 um 17:55 schrieb Peter Amstutz: > [...] > With regard to "strings" (meaning text), I've been thinking that it > should be a separate type that includes the encoding. This would be > distinct from "symbols" which are particular VOS core strings like > method names, child name, fields tags, etc. The reasoning being the > latter would be managed in a symbol table to reduce memory usage and > speed up string compares (simplifying a symbol compare to comparing > pointers). > Sounds good, in a binary encoding you might even want to replace symbols completely by numbers.
> Also, I would like to address internationalization issues in the next > iteration of VOS, but I don't know much about it, so advice (such as > what the best way is to handle unicode) is would be greatly > appreciated. > No idea either, except that full i18n is a real pain... you have to hink about text flow direction for once, and what happens if you quote an English phrase in an Arabian text... I get the vague notion that UTF8 is what most people are doing right now, at least in the western hemisphere. No idea about asian languages, which might prefer UTF16, but which do have a bunch of legacy solutions as well iirc. > Back to the topic of unsigned types, as I said they are more > elegant for > certain purposes where negative values are undefined, like a length or > offset of a list. It's not that big of a deal, but I want to try to > strike the right balance between the capabilities of C++ and > scripting/ > other languages we want VOS to talk to. > Well... While I like Java in many respects, I still resent their notion of signed bytes. This is more an artifact of the type system than something anybody would really want. I usually start cursing when I have to re-construct multi-byte values from foreign file formats or protocols. That said, it most certainly *is* possible to live with that, even for byte arrays in I/O, as long as the arithmetic operations basically treat the high-order-bit like any other. Regards, Karsten. _______________________________________________ vos-d mailing list vos-d@interreality.org http://www.interreality.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/vos-d
