Unicode would be great, if someone wants to implement that in Pd, I
would fully support that.
As for the simple question of unsigned versus signed for any2string, I
have never heard of using negative values for chars, so it makes
perfect sense to me to use 0-255. That'll will give at least the full
latin charset.
.hc
On Jan 15, 2009, at 12:45 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Bryan Jurish wrote:
Unicode might be more immediately intuitive to most users, but when
it comes down to it, byte-strings are IMHO the more basic
representation (a char* is still a char*, even in this post-unicode world).What happened is that people switched to UTF-8 instead of some fixed- size encoding because many apps that assume that a character is a
byte will work anyway. Just don't ask those apps to say how many
characters there are in a string though. You have to pretend that
all the "special" characters are pairs of characters instead (when
they are not triplets).A good string handling mechanism should have a good general default
representation (e.g. as UTF-${MachineWordBits}), but should
likewise allow access to "raw" byte strings, and be able to
accommodate various encodings. Not that I'm really hankering to
write any of that, mind you ;-) Perhaps a better name for the
external as I think of it would be [any2bytes]. I'm perfectly
willing to cede the "string" name to something better (Martin's
string patch comes to mind),I gather that it'll take a long time before Pd gets unicode support...
... except if you're building rsp. reading a persistent index for a large file, in which case tell() & seek() are likely to be a wee bit faster than parsing and counting variable-length-encoded
characters ...right.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal,
Québec_______________________________________________ Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
All information should be free. - the hacker ethic