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Re: Query on UTF-32 encodings for letters
On 2005-01-18, at 07:20, Robert Dewar wrote:
Marcin Dalecki wrote:
Look the problem isn't the fact that somebody wishes to support
international
encodings for symbols in code. This may be even helpful to some.
However I still stand by the opinion that declaring them case
insensitive
is some kind of wired idiocy which can be only the result of some
polit-bureau group. What are the good reasons to make them such in
first place?
OK, but the fight over whether Ada should have case insensitive
identifier
names was discussed and decided 20 years ago, with almost no
controversy.
Pretty much everyone agreed this was the way to go. There are many good
reasons, which are not worth rehashing here, since this thread is not
about replaying that old chesnut! And if you start of thinking it is
wired idiocy, and have not bothered to read up on the issue, I think
it unlikely to be fruitful to discuss it in any case!
Reading up on the issue or not is not the point here. Simple due to the
fact
that I'm indeed a person which is using up to 4 different languages
with
different character set encodings (ASCII, Latin-1, Latin-2, KO8-R,
KOI8-U) on
a regular basis, did make me already suffer enough from such "good"
"i18n" ideas.
Bah... Even in the simple case where I did have to read some code
commented in german,
I did nearly always for some reason have to adjust to a different wired
pseudo-standard encoding I didn't have support for on the system I did
have to use it on.
Based on this experience I just think that you are indeed wasting your
time
on extending such a facility. There simply isn't such a thing
like a well defined equivalence relation R holding only and
only then when some two string x,y are equal with disregard to the
casing: x R y.
There are too many external variables such a relation depends on. There
isn't
even such a basic thing as a standard way to tell which encoding a file
is
written in. If looking at cyrillic for example it nearly always turns
out to be
a guess game... ALT, KOI8-R, ISO-8859-5, KOI8-U, CP1259?