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Postings from July 2011
On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 3:17 AM, Johan Vromans <jvromans@squirrel.nl> wrote: > Tom Christiansen <tchrist@perl.com> writes: > >> The Dot Problem will never be solved until people start thinking in >> Unicode not ASCII. Otherwise you’ll “solve” the “wrong” “problem”. > > Not quite. I think you had the tiger by the tail one sentence earlier: > >> […] let’s please step back and evaluate the original sense of “.” […] > > This is what matters. What is the intended purpose of “.”? > > Originally, the intention was to be able to match ‘lines’ in a blob of > data slurped from a disk file. Files at the time were newline separated > streams of single-byte characters, so “.” matched any byte except \x0a > (newline). That this assumption would not hold in the longer term became > apparent when Windows, Mac, VMS and EBCDIC files came into > consideration. > > Should we want our new “.” to acquire the originally intended meaning, > we first must decide what makes up lines in files in the modern Unicode > world. Notwithstanding the validity of Tom's diagnosis of the bigger issues, +1 for this insight alone. If the most common case is arguably still "let me slurp a line of input", then we should attempt to preserve that semantic. -- DavidThread Previous | Thread Next