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Postings from February 2001
On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 04:17:11PM -0600, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> > > > [locales are just ways to assign a different cultural information to
> > > > integers (=characters). As Larry said, Perl should allow one use
> > >
> > > I wish they where -- but they are not. That's not how they have been
> > > (very weakly defined by standards and (badly) implemented by vendors.
> > > For one thing, they have very little to with character encodings.
> >
> > Here I discuss "locales as seen from Perl", not something else.
>
> The current implementation of locales in Perl is tightly tied to the
> (regrettably non-standard and broken) implementation of locales in
> vendors' lib(c)s.
[Thinking about it for another two minutes:] So Perl uses
"cultural-info" tables stored in the C RTL, instead of ones of its
own. Who cares? It is still a switch of "cultural-info" tables.
[Is there any place where this description breaks - except for
collation issues when sorting? AFAI checked, in all others operatons
all Perl does is checking some flags character-by-character.]
> The locale implementation you seem to be referring to does not
> exist.
See above. It exists for many years.
> >From quick reading sounds reasonable and feasible, but see my first
> paragraphs. Getting the Unicode anywhere near working as it is now
> has taken us two years and seven months (I'm counting from 5.005_50),
> and about two different models & implementations. Now you are
> proposing a third one.
a) What I'm proposing is 99.9% implemented. All you needed to do is
to *reject* everything which breaks transparency.
Contrary to what you imply, the damage is done not by you not
working enough, but by you *accepting* too much - accepting the
things which make it much harder to have a sane implementation at
some future time.
It is allowing dirty workarounds (in the *language*!) around
existing bugs in the implementation which makes your life hard.
Trust me. ;-)
b) It is just the same model I "invented" two years ago, and which
(AFAIU) was accepted as the model for Unicode support in Perl.
Ilya
P.S. Remember Larry's saying about 0, 1, and infinity? You want to
make Perl have 2 distinct types of strings. This should not happen.
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