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Postings from September 2010
A Unicode named sequence is a single name for a string of characters.
For example, TAMIL SYLLABLE HO is actually two characters that together
are commonly referred to by this name.
It is easy to add these to the compile-time construct \N{...}, as that
returns a character string of any length. However this doesn't work for
charnames::vianame() which currently performs essentially the identical
behavior at runtime, as it returns a single ordinal value, so can't
handle named sequences without changing its behavior.
I see two options that may be viable:
1) Don't change vianame, but perhaps add another function which performs
identically to \N{}, but at runtime.
2) Change vianame so that in list context it returns the list of
ordinals that make up a name. In scalar context it would return undef
for these. This isn't strictly backwards compatible, as someone could
currently be calling vianame in list context and get just the single
ordinal. And now they could get an array returned that has multiple
entries, but only for names that currently return undef.
Any comments?
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