develooper Front page | perl.perl6.internals | Postings from June 2001

Re: The internal string API

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Dan Sugalski
Date:
June 19, 2001 12:41
Subject:
Re: The internal string API
Message ID:
5.1.0.14.0.20010619153333.0209ab40@24.8.96.48
At 02:31 PM 6/19/2001 -0500, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> > I think you misunderstand my point. It is "a property of the code region",
> > but "a property of the context in which is the code is running". For
> > example,
> > Taiwanese read traditional chinese characters, but PRC people read
> > simplied chinese. Even we take the same data, and same program (code),
> > people just read differently. As an end user, I want to make the decision.
> > It will drive me crazy if Perl render/display the text file using
> > traditional
> > chinese just because it was tagged as "Big5".
>
>A very good point.  Locale is not per data nor per data region,
>nor per process nor per thread, nor per server; it's per user
>and per client.

Gah. I thought (and I use the word loosely here) that locales generally 
specified how a particular character should be interpreted when there's 
some ambiguity--the high bit ASCII characters spring to mind, given there's 
a dozen or more different interpretations with them. I was under the 
impression that given an encoding and a locale, there was no ambiguity and 
that the interpretation of a particular character was exact. In the Big5 
case, I'd assume that there'd be at least two different 
locales--Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese--that governed how the 
characters are interpreted.

I get the feeling I'm being rather naive here, huh?

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk


Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About