Re: guile can't find a chinese named file

[Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net>]

Mike Gran <spk121@yahoo.com>:

> On Tuesday, February 14, 2017 1:07 PM, Marko Rauhamaa
> <marko@pacujo.net> wrote:
>> Unicode strings are a special data type that have relatively little>
>> practical use. Byte strings are much more fundamental. C's "char *"
>> is perfect.
>
> Human language itself is of limited practical use except for
> communicating information to people that read languages that have a
> text representation.

Unicode is useful, don't get me wrong. However, Unicode is not the same
as "human language itself". Unicode is a huge can of worms, and yet not
big enough. It is best reserved for the use of text-processing
applications. It shouldn't be shoved down the throat of each and every
application.

A much more fundamental data type is the byte string, which can
represent many things, including Unicode. With UTF-8, I mostly don't
need an interpretive step to deal with plain text. Sure, I can't know
the visual width of my plain text string, but it's not simply the number
of Unicode points, either, because of diacritics and other similar
complications.

>> In particular, filenames are *not*, nor can they be mapped to,
>> Unicode strings in Linux.
>
> True. Linux should follow OpenBSD and make all locales UTF-8.

Maybe, but Guile should wait until Linux has made the transition. There
are no signs of such a transition at the moment. Linux deals in bytes
and couldn't care less about interpreting those bytes.


Marko