Re: Unicode in strings

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

I'm not sure the codepoint-oriented API is the best option, but it's not
completely clear what *is* the best option.  You mention a byte-oriented
API and you might be right that it's a better option, but in the case of
Emacs that's what we used in Emacs-20.1 but it worked really poorly
because of backward compatibility issues.  I think if we started from
scratch now (i.e. without having to contend with backward compatibility,
and with a better understanding of Unicode (which barely existed back
then)) it might work better, indeed, but that's not been an option

Plus, editors are among the very few uses where you have to deal with
individual characters, so the "treat it as opaque string" approach
that works so well for most other code is not good enough there.  The
command-line editor of Gforth is one case where we use the xchar words
(those for dealing with code points of UTF-8).

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>