Re: defining new character names?

[rm@fabula.de]

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On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 11:20:28AM +0200, Matthias Koeppe wrote:
> rm@fabula.de writes:
> 
> > I have to admit that i toyed with the idea of extending guiles 
> > scm_charnames[] array in chars.c myself. My idea was to extend the
> > table to use the names also used for ISO 8879 character entities 
> > (mostly known from their use in HTML pages). Since such entities are
> > specific to an encoding it would make sense to make the table extensible
> > (i guess this would need to be done by extending the read-options inter-
> > face).
> 
> I think that it is a bad idea to make Guile's characters
> encoding-specific.  This is not the right way to internationalize
> Guile.

Hmm, as i understand it right now, a character in guile is never
encoding-specific (and i never suggested making it so).
What i (and Lars, i guess) suggest, is to make guile's list of _named_ 
character literals configurable. Nothing more. Since this is a question
of the _reader_ it won't change anything. Whether i type #\Auml or 'Ä'
(that's an capital 'a' with a german umlaut accent for those non-iso-8859-1ers)
doesn't make any difference to the guile interpreter, or?

> Instead, we should change Guile's characters to Unicode.  Then, of
> course, it makes sense to allow Unicode character names (and ISO 8879
> character entities) for #\ syntax.
> 
> The encoding of characters should only be an issue for input/output
> and interaction with C libraries.
> 
> Is anyone working on Unicode support for Guile?

Good question! The current state of unicode support makes it impossible to
use guile with XML, i'm affraid :-(

  Ralf
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> Matthias K?ppe -- http://www.math.uni-magdeburg.de/~mkoeppe


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