From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: main.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Andy Wingo Newsgroups: gmane.lisp.guile.devel Subject: Unicode and Guile Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 19:15:34 +0200 Sender: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Message-ID: <20031021171534.GA13246@lark> NNTP-Posting-Host: deer.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: sea.gmane.org 1067068676 10437 80.91.224.253 (25 Oct 2003 07:57:56 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@sea.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2003 07:57:56 +0000 (UTC) Original-X-From: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sat Oct 25 09:57:54 2003 Return-path: Original-Received: from monty-python.gnu.org ([199.232.76.173]) by deer.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1ADJJ4-0004VC-00 for ; Sat, 25 Oct 2003 09:57:54 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.24) id 1ADJIO-0001Ow-S0 for guile-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 25 Oct 2003 03:57:12 -0400 Original-Received: from list by monty-python.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.24) id 1ADJIK-0001O7-Ix for guile-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 25 Oct 2003 03:57:08 -0400 Original-Received: from mail by monty-python.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.24) id 1ADJHo-000193-9r for guile-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 25 Oct 2003 03:57:07 -0400 Original-Received: from [216.166.232.203] (helo=ambient.2y.net) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtp (TLSv1:DES-CBC3-SHA:168) (Exim 4.24) id 1ADJHn-0000xo-QP for guile-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 25 Oct 2003 03:56:35 -0400 Original-Received: from localhost (softdnserr [::ffff:196.44.143.227]) (AUTH: LOGIN wingo) by ambient.2y.net with esmtp; Sat, 25 Oct 2003 03:56:28 -0400 Original-Received: from wingo by localhost with local (Exim 3.36 #1 (Debian)) id 1AC06Y-0003SH-00 for ; Tue, 21 Oct 2003 19:15:34 +0200 Original-To: guile-devel@gnu.org Mail-Followup-To: guile-devel@gnu.org Content-Disposition: inline X-Operating-System: Linux lark 2.4.20-1-686 User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i X-BeenThere: guile-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.2 Precedence: list List-Id: Developers list for Guile, the GNU extensibility library List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guile-devel-bounces+guile-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: main.gmane.org gmane.lisp.guile.devel:2921 X-Report-Spam: http://spam.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.guile.devel:2921 Hey folks, What's the plan on internationalization of strings in Guile? If there is no plan, may I suggest that we move our internal representation of strings to UTF-8. There's an interesting introductory article written on www.joelonsoftware.com, although I don't have the link ATM. This has the advantage that ASCII characters up to 127 are represented the same. Of course, above that characters might take up to eight bytes, which means that all code that processes user-input strings has to be changed. Painful, eh? But if we hope to write apps that deal with all languages of the world, that's the only way. So, reactions on that would be appreciated. To make it easy, may I also suggest that we use GLib to handle all of the unicode mess for us. This does introduce a dependency, but libglib-2.0.so is only 400K and it's likely to be in memory anyway on most systems. We don't need to expose any GLib-style functions, they can all be wrapped with their scheme equivalents. Since the underlying representation can still be stored as char*, it might be possible to make a (ice-9 unicode) library that would override all the original bindings for character and string functions. We can still require that the reader accept the low half of ASCII for code, so that can stay the same. It's only dealing with strings that would be an issue (some reader modifications required there). Then to display a string would be a simple matter of g_locale_from_utf8 (). My native language is English, so I don't have to deal with this problem too much. But GNU is not just for European languages, so we should do our best to spread the love around. Also, from working on guile-gtk, we really need to have a comprehensive framework for internationalization, and it sucks when C is ahead of us in this department. Thoughts? Andy _______________________________________________ Guile-devel mailing list Guile-devel@gnu.org http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/guile-devel