Re: text in programming languages, Unicode in strings

jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:

In article <2024May20.145316@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>,
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) wrote:
>

I am not convinced that the locale-specific input is a good idea,
though.

>
You look pretty silly if your input function can't read the products of
your output function, and figuring out what separators have been used
automatically is not foolproof.

Yes and yes.  Especially given the "," vs. "." roles in various
locales.

But OTOH, not being able to read or, worse, misinterpreting the output
produced by someone else just because that output was produced under a
different locale is pretty silly, too.

For reserved words and builtin names of programming languages, the
solution has been to make them independent of the locale and ignore
Algol 60 and Algol 68 for programming, which suggested something else.

We already do the same for the decimal separator in the usual output
functions (it uses "."), we should introduce thousands separators that
are also locale-independent.

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