On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 01:14:48PM -0500, John Macdonald wrote:
: On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 09:59:50AM +0000, Simon Cozens wrote:
: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Andy Wardley) writes:
: > > Sure, make Perl Unicode compliant, right down to variable and operator
: > > names. But don't make people spend an afternoon messing around with mutt,
: > > vim, emacs and all the other tools they use, just so that they can read,
: > > write, email and print Perl programs correctly.
: >
: > To be honest, I don't think that'll be a problem, but only because by the
: > time Perl 6 is widely deployed, people will have got themselves sorted out
: > as far as Unicode's concerned. I suspect similar things were said when C
: > decided to use 7 bit characters.
:
: Don't be so sure. I've been seeing the << and >>
: characters properly sometimes, as ??? sometimes,
: and I think there were some other variants (maybe for
: other extended characters) - depending upon whether
: I'm reading the messages locally at home or remotely
: through a terminal emulator. Those emulators are
: not about to be replaced for any other reason in the
: near future.
Well, sure. But what we're trying to optimize here is specifically
not the near future.
: I'll be able to work it out if I have to, but it'll
: be an annoyance, and probably one that shows up
: many times with different bits of software, and
: often those bits will not be under my control and
: will have to be worked around rather than "fixed".
: (In the canine-ical sense, it is the current software
: that is "fixed", i.e. it has limited functionality.)
:
: > That doesn't mean I think Unicode operators are a good idea, of course.
:
: They will cause problems for sure.
No question about that. But Unicode is addressing (or attempting
to address) a basic unreducable complexity of the world, and I'm not
willing to sweep that complexity under someone else's carpet for
the purposes of short-term anaesthesia. I expect that over the long
term people will learn to use Unicode in moderation, after a short
period of (over)exuberant experimentation.
As a temporary measure (where temporary is measured in years), I'd
suggest Unicode declarations include an C<is ASCII('[EMAIL PROTECTED]')> trait.
Larry
