Re: Can't make emacs use utf-8?? (on WinXP)

[Benjamin Riefenstahl <Benjamin.Riefenstahl@epost.de>]

Hi Bjoern,


Bjoern <p2@blinker.net> writes:
> But wasn't Java the first programming language to promote Unicode?
> I haven't tried it yet, as untill yesterday I really stuck to ASCII.

The first thing for Unicode to rule the world (;-)) is that
programmers need to start writing programs that can do Unicode,
e.g. in Java.  Only when it is a common thing can you actually use it
*during* programming.  We are not there yet, there are still quite a
number of other encodings around, and the Java compiler has to cope
with them as any other tool.

So while Java accepts non-ASCII in a number of places (including
identifiers, I believe) for portability reasons you shouldn't just
write them without precautions IMO.  You can either use UCNs (those
\uXXXX codes), or you can use the native2ascii tool that comes with
the JDK to translate to UCNs, or you can just avoid using non-ASCII
characters in code altogether.  The last one is the easiest.

There are even those, like me, that believe that the language of
identifiers and comments should be simple English anyway, to maximize
reusability.


so long, benny