Comments on: Go Unicode http://www.extinguishedscholar.com/wpglob/?p=513 Powered by work over time. Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:54:57 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Jens Ayton http://www.extinguishedscholar.com/wpglob/?p=513&cpage=1#comment-11875 Jens Ayton Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:19:51 +0000 http://www.extinguishedscholar.com/wpglob/?p=513#comment-11875 I’d rather see strings having the interface of a sequence of code points with actual storage being implementation-defined – like NSStrings back in Unicode 1.x. Still, Go’s approach seems reasonable… unlike, say, Arc’s “strings are hard, let’s have a bucket of bytes instead” approach. I definitely agree that normalization shouldn’t be part of a basic equality operator. Going off on a wild tangent, I recently had to explain to some Linux distro why Oolite requires its own build of Spidermonkey. The specific reason is that it requires JS_STRINGS_ARE_UTF8 to be defined, which it isn’t in normal builds; further research showed that the Mozilla folks had tried that, but it had blown up in their faces because the XUL API uses strings as data blobs. Last I saw, the plan was to fix this (and break compatibility) in Gecko 2.0/Firefox 4. Strings are for text, data is from Venus! I’d rather see strings having the interface of a sequence of code points with actual storage being implementation-defined – like NSStrings back in Unicode 1.x. Still, Go’s approach seems reasonable… unlike, say, Arc’s “strings are hard, let’s have a bucket of bytes instead” approach. I definitely agree that normalization shouldn’t be part of a basic equality operator.

Going off on a wild tangent, I recently had to explain to some Linux distro why Oolite requires its own build of Spidermonkey. The specific reason is that it requires JS_STRINGS_ARE_UTF8 to be defined, which it isn’t in normal builds; further research showed that the Mozilla folks had tried that, but it had blown up in their faces because the XUL API uses strings as data blobs. Last I saw, the plan was to fix this (and break compatibility) in Gecko 2.0/Firefox 4. Strings are for text, data is from Venus!

]]> By: zinc http://www.extinguishedscholar.com/wpglob/?p=513&cpage=1#comment-11874 zinc Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:31:37 +0000 http://www.extinguishedscholar.com/wpglob/?p=513#comment-11874 <i>[editor's note: this was spam for some vitamin site, but is a direct quote from a somewhat relevant part of <a href="http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf" rel="nofollow">an important paper</a>.]</i> End-to-end arguments are a kind of “Occam’s razor” when it comes to choosing the functions to be provided in a communication subsystem. Because the communication subsystem is frequently specified before applications that use the subsystem are known, the designer may be tempted to “help” the users by taking on more function than necessary. Awareness of end-to-end arguments can help to reduce such temptations. [editor's note: this was spam for some vitamin site, but is a direct quote from a somewhat relevant part of an important paper.]

End-to-end arguments are a kind of “Occam’s razor” when it comes to choosing the functions to be provided in a communication subsystem. Because the communication subsystem is frequently specified before applications that use the subsystem are known, the designer may be tempted to “help” the users by taking on more function than necessary. Awareness of end-to-end arguments can help to reduce such temptations.

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