[gambit-list] Making UTF-8 the default for Gambit

Hendrik Boom hendrik at topoi.pooq.com
Tue Aug 15 10:52:18 EDT 2017


On Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 10:15:01AM -0400, Marc Feeley wrote:
> Do you want:
> 
> 1) the compiler to accept source code in UTF-8 character encoding?
> 2) compiled programs to read and write characters using UTF-8 character encoding?
> 
> #1 can be done with “gsc -:f8 …”
> #2 can be done by starting your program with the shebang “#! /usr/bin/env gsi -:t8,f8,-8”.

I've found that the way to handle UTF-8 in my programs is *mostly* to 
simply ignore the problem.  I read bytes, write bytes, and treat anything 
outside the usual ASCII character set as simply being more letters.

If the application needs anything else to be done with specific 
characters, I treat this as part of the lexical analyser instead as part 
of the character reader.

There's no conversion of everything to and from wide characters on input 
and output.

There are likely applications in which this isn't efficient.  And there 
are likely code points which aren't properly handled this way. But 
there are a lot for which this is all that is needed.

-- hendrik



More information about the Gambit-list mailing list