Re: [9fans] Re: 9base ports to unix (flame of byron's rc)

["Anselm R. Garbe" <garbeam@gmail.com>]

On 8/20/05, quanstro@speakeasy.net <quanstro@speakeasy.net> wrote:
> well the gentoo folks should have consulted you before deciding
> to name their init script /sbin/rc. see this bug for some humor:
> http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45183

Fun :)

> you've also got to realize that in 1990 linus and tannenbaum were still
> duking it out. nobody had any idea that plan9 stuff would actually be
> available to the public. byron's rc would not have been written if
> that had been the case.

Sure.

> > Anymore? Which *NIX tool did ever support unicode? I know of none,
> > even today there's no Unix tool which really supports UTF8. Those UTF8
> > locales in Linux are a joke, and these Mozilla workaround are just
> > insane.
> 
> many unix tools do pretty well with utf-8 (thank's rob, ken. excellent design.)
> do-nothing gets you a long way towards utf-8 support.
> 
> obviously, explicitly single-character-based stuff breaks. but i've been using
> utf-8 for years without any serious problems. sam and 9term have managed
> when other tools (e.g. vi, xterm) were confused.
> 
> in fact, gnu's utf-8 "support" has made things quite a bit worse. unless it's
> been fixed in the last month grep on a fixed ascii string in ascii text is about
> 100x slower in a utf-8 locale because wctomb() is called on each character.

I referred more to the GNU stuff and non-plan9ish tools which
introduced locales instead... but well, there haven't been much tools
except the plan9ish ones which supported utf8 in the 90s already. And
as stated what I've seen so far in the Unix world are many different
approaches which never work well - I investigated some time into the
X11 crap to get UTF8 working, but with very emberassing results (even
public available libraries like libcairo are crashing when processing
UTF8 strings for odd reasons)... there might be hope that this will
change. But I personally consider using libutf9 from plan9 and
libregexp instead of hoping... 9term and sam did similiar
(libXg/libtext dependencies which solved UTF8 very early).

> the grammar was publised in duff's original paper. the "similarities"
> were all based on reading the paper. i don't think you understand how
> restrictive AT&T licensing was at the time.

Ok, that explains the comments especially in the yacc file.

Thanks so far,
-- 
  Anselm R. Garbe  ><><  www.ebrag.de  ><><  GPG key: 0D73F361