[gambit-list] Character encoding and the repl

Adam adam.mlmb at gmail.com
Fri May 29 15:38:51 EDT 2015


2015-05-30 1:03 GMT+05:30 Adam <adam.mlmb at gmail.com>:

> Symbols should under ordinary conditions not contain chars >= 128 as
> standard software practice is to implement all identifiers in English, or
> englishify them at the level of alphabet use e.g. 'uber ;
>
> If anybody with a non-English-alphabet wants to use Gambti for instance
> for conveniency in educational purposes, then they can reconfigure
> themselves.
>
>
> The amount of systems that are not UTF8-compliant is unlimited, and you
> never know when data copied/pasted etc. would pass through that,
>

(Wait, it's not UTF8 compliancy that's the question here, but whether the
protocol/tool/etc. does that and also is UTF8 by default.)


> so keeping the default setting as sparse as possible makes enormous sense.
> For instance;
>  * Protocols: the SMTP and HTTP protcol is not UTF-8 by default, at least
> with not-too-unrecent browsers. I guess the same applies with,
>  * Filesystems (FAT),
>  * Various text editors I guess - at least VIM last I checked - and
>  * Various other tools.
>  * Fonts: You don't even know what characters beyond 0..127 that fonts
> implement, and absence of chars in the 128..256 range happens.
>
>
> After having pondered extending the default even just from 127 to 255 by
> looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1#Codepage_layout ,
> I think an extension would be a bad idea because of the above reasons.
>
>
> The one who wants more than that for text output can just use the
> non-escaping output routines e.g. print and display, that is really part of
> minimum knowledge.
>
>
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