Re: [Caml-list] Immutable strings

[Raoul Duke <raould@gmail.com>]

ja wohl, n'est pas, это жизнь, based on my experiences with strings
and stuff over the years, i resonate with what Daniel posted. :-)
things like UTF-whatever are baseline requirements, but beyond that
(a) nobody has it right (b) unicode sucks. :-)

On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Daniel Bünzli
<daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch> wrote:
> Le mardi, 8 juillet 2014 à 19:15, mattiasw@gmail.com a écrit :
>> My two cents:
>>
>> To me it seems very strange to introduce a new string type and not make it
>> UTF-8 from start.
>
> No new string type was introduced. A bytes type was introduced.
>
>> ocaml will be that last language that doesn't have standardize unicode
>> support.
>
> What do you mean by standarized unicode support in the language *exactly* ?
>
> I'd be genuinely interested in knowing the actual real level of support for Unicode in these language, beyond saying our string is an UTF-X encoded sequence of scalar values. For example do these other language do perform Unicode normalisation on string literals/patterns (and identifiers if they choose that craze) ? This for example would be absolutely necessary to have for performing any kind of real world processing on unicode strings, but then there's not only a single normalisation form and the one you want depends on the context. Do they have a notation to indicate in which form they want the literal/pattern to be ?
>
>> Even old languages like Erlang has gone the UTF-8 way, and that
>> includes program code.
>
> For a very very very very long time it has been possible to write, unnormalized or normalized according to the normal form your editor, UTF-8 encoded literals in your OCaml sources; you just had to drop the idea of using latin1 identifiers, which are now anyway deprecated since 4.01.
>
> As for being able to write Unicode *identifiers* in the language I'm actually quite glad OCaml hasn't that, there are both too many arrow characters to use in Unicode and too many unreasonable programmers out there.
>
>> Bytes and strings have nothing in common, but str.[4] is still relevant for
>> UTF-8 strings.
>
> Direct indexing is rarely relevant in Unicode as usually you want those indexes to correspond to user perceived characters (e.g. to align things in text formatting) and user perceived characters may be written as a sequence of unicode scalar value… or not (even in normal forms, since an arbitrary number of combining character can be applied to a base character). The unicode segmentation algorithm allows you to find these boundaries, simple indexing doesn't and is mostly worthless in Unicode processing.
>
> Best,
>
> Daniel
>
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