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Re: Is char obsolete?

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BartC <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:
> "Lauri Alanko" <la@iki.fi> wrote in message news:innf6e$5v5$1@oravannahka.helsinki.fi...
<snip>
> > But I'm saying that nowadays the basic execution character set no
> > longer suffices for general-purpose text manipulation. So
> > wherever you need to manipulate an individual character as a
> > character, you'd better use wchar_t or similar.

> To do unicode properly, I don't think it's just a question of using a
> slightly wider type; you'll probably be using extra libraries anyway.

All wider types do is obscure the problem. The OP should sit down with a
book on Unicode and learn the difference between abstract characters,
combining characters, code points, graphemes, grapheme clusters,
etc.

Once one realizes that no type could be wide enough to allow simplistic
indexing of strings--as linear arrays--then it becomes much easier to
content oneself with char. And that's ignoring all the other complex issues.
The more complex the operations one wants to do on the string--such as word
splitting--the more useless wider types become by themselves, conceptually.

Perl 6 comes the closest, AFAIU, to addressing the complexity of Unicode by
inventing it's own normalization form, "NFG". At runtime it builds a
"grapheme table" mapping new code points to irreducible sets of Unicode code
points so that strings can be indexed with sensible results. Basically, Perl
6 handles Unicode not merely by increasing the integral width, but by
implementing strings in two dimensions.

Perl 6 also has special Unicode operators for complex string operations.

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Thread

Is char obsolete? Lauri Alanko <la@iki.fi> - 2011-04-08 13:06 +0000
  Re: Is char obsolete? Chris H <chris@phaedsys.org> - 2011-04-08 14:55 +0100
  Re: Is char obsolete? Thomas Richter <thor@math.tu-berlin.de> - 2011-04-08 17:04 +0200
    Re: Is char obsolete? Chris H <chris@phaedsys.org> - 2011-04-08 16:32 +0100
      Re: Is char obsolete? Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2011-04-08 17:02 +0100
      Re: Is char obsolete? Thomas Richter <thor@math.tu-berlin.de> - 2011-04-09 21:57 +0200
        Re: Is char obsolete? James Kuyper <jameskuyper@verizon.net> - 2011-04-09 16:47 -0400
          Re: Is char obsolete? William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-04-09 15:10 -0700
            Re: Is char obsolete? James Kuyper <jameskuyper@verizon.net> - 2011-04-09 18:44 -0400
  Re: Is char obsolete? Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2011-04-08 16:13 +0100
    Re: Is char obsolete? Keith Thompson <kst-u@mib.org> - 2011-04-08 12:55 -0700
      Re: Is char obsolete? Ben Bacarisse <ben.usenet@bsb.me.uk> - 2011-04-08 22:16 +0100
  Re: Is char obsolete? Lauri Alanko <la@iki.fi> - 2011-04-08 17:04 +0000
    Re: Is char obsolete? Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-04-08 20:10 +0100
      Re: Is char obsolete? "robertwessel2@yahoo.com" <robertwessel2@yahoo.com> - 2011-04-08 15:43 -0700
        Re: Is char obsolete? Nobody <nobody@nowhere.com> - 2011-04-09 22:44 +0100
    Re: Is char obsolete? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2011-04-08 21:04 +0100
      Re: Is char obsolete? William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-04-08 15:01 -0700
        Re: Is char obsolete? Lauri Alanko <la@iki.fi> - 2011-04-09 14:27 +0000
          Re: Is char obsolete? "BartC" <bc@freeuk.com> - 2011-04-09 19:14 +0100
          Re: Is char obsolete? William Ahern <william@wilbur.25thandClement.com> - 2011-04-09 12:02 -0700
    Re: Is char obsolete? Ian Collins <ian-news@hotmail.com> - 2011-04-09 09:40 +1200
  Re: Is char obsolete? Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> - 2011-04-08 23:07 +0200

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