Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond

Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:

The point I wanted to make is that there is the frequent
misconception that dealing with individual arbitrary characters is
something that is relatively common, and that one can do that by using
UTF-32 (or UTF-16); it isn't, and one cannot.

Do you really mean one cannot change an individual character
using UTF-32?  I assume you mean "there is no need to do it"..

If you stick with UTF-8
and use byte lengths and byte indexes, you can do almost everything as
well or better (with less complication and more efficiently) as by
converting to UTF-32 and back.

Assume you're implementing a language which has a function of
setting an individual character in a string.  How would you
implement it?  Run through the string?  Would you then also
store additional information somewhere so that the next character
that the user sets does not need to do it again?

Just curious...