This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 91 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 91 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
bear scripsit: > Didn't want it both ways. String-set!, with unchanged contract, > can be implemented on top of purely functional methods for > manipulating string bodies and an atomic single mutation for > manipulating the string head. Ah. Okay. > Hah? Unicode already encompasses, I believe, every living > language with a writing system. If you mean that there are > programmers who can't get meaningful identifiers using the > character set defined as of Unicode 4.1.0, I want to know > who those programmers are. Perhaps "potential programmers" is the correct expression. I currently count about 15 scripts commonly used to write living languages in the pipeline that are not yet in Unicode 4.1, and there are a number of natural languages that use existing scripts but don't quite have all their characters: e.g. the Myanmar script currently handles Burmese but not the minority languages of Myanmar. It may be that no speakers of those languages are currently programmers, but this is not fundamental. Certainly things have improved quite a bit since XML 1.0, which froze identifiers at Unicode 2.0. > Meanwhile, allowing identifier syntax to shift with every > version of Unicode creates the potential for version > incompatibilities. I quite agree, which is why I propose a fixed though over-inclusive syntax along the lines of the "alternative identifiers" documented by Unicode. Alternative identifiers allow whatever is not explicitly forbidden, while still providing plenty of symbol characters for read-syntax extensions. -- Principles. You can't say A is John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> made of B or vice versa. All mass http://www.ccil.org/~cowan is interaction. --Richard Feynman