Edmond Dantes wrote: >The real issue is, of course, that ASCII is showing its age and we should >probably supplant it with something better. But I know that will never fly, >given the torrents of code, configuration files, and everything else in >ASCII. Even Unicode couldn't put a dent in it, despite the obvious growing >global development efforts. Not sure how many compilers would be able to >handle Unicode source anyway. I suspect the large majority of them would >would choke big time. > > I think that was the old conventional wisdom, but it's not so obvious anymore. UTF-8 is a pretty cool standard. gVim handles it just fine, Python source allows UTF-8 within string literals, even if it doesn't like it in identifiers, and IIRC, Unicode is the official standard for Java files. It continues not to be used so much, but a lot of the capacity is there.
Also, the 'config files in ASCII' thing is simply not a problem -- ASCII *is* a full-subset of UTF-8, so an ASCII config file is already a UTF-8 config file. Personally, I don't think ASCII is nearly as entrenched as you suggest. I wouldn't be surprised if Unicode/UTF-8 has fully supplanted it inside of 10 years. Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
