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Re: Surrogates and character representation

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 75 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 75 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



John.Cowan wrote:
Per Bothner wrote:
> Random accesses to a position in a string that has not
> been previously accessed is not in itself useful.

Another use case, archaic as it may seem, is still important: processing
fixed-length fields in text files.

Such applications are probably not using Unicode ...
In Unicode-land, the concept is pretty meaningless: are you
talking about
(1) a fixed display width (number of columns) - if so the
numbers of "characters" (or bytes") is unrelated to the display
width; or
(2) a fixed number of bytes in a file - if so immediately fire anybody who writes any new applications doing this! (And "legacy" applications
will not support Unicode.)
--
	--Per Bothner
per@xxxxxxxxxxx   http://per.bothner.com/