Doug,
On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, Doug Tody wrote:
> Sure, I agree that the range of allowable chars should be restricted
> as you suggest. My suggestion is to specify UTF-8, restricted as
> has been discussed for 7-bit chars, but allowing UTF-8 encoded chars
> to pass through. That would seem to do it and we still have simple
> ASCII virtually all of the time so I don't think this will break
> legacy code. If at some point full up unicode is needed (eg 16 bit
> chars), that should be a different data type.
I am slightly against this, since it reduces the simplicity of what's going on. In practice, as you say, I think the amount of problematic behaviour that defining SAMP string content as UTF-8 would cause would be very small. But I've had to go to the Unicode web site and read the UTF-8 FAQs to convince myself that this is the case. Sloppy programmers who don't carefully read the spec and treat the byte stream as if it's ASCII will be fine >99% of the time. But some burden will be imposed on careful programmers who want to make sure that the UTF-8 is treated properly, especially if they are working on platforms which are not Unicode-aware. If non-Latin character transmission is in the category "essential" or even "nice to have" I'd say this is a price worth paying. If it's just "because we can" I'd say it's not. Responses so far to my question:
On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, Mark Taylor wrote:
> Which of these is best depends on how important the requirement to be
> able to send Unicode and control characters is. My vote is not very.
> Can we have a show of hands?
suggest to me that this is in the "because we can" category. But if people believe that non-Latin character transmission is something that we really ought to have in SAMP strings, then I'd go along with this suggestion.
Mark
-- Mark Taylor Astronomical Programmer Physics, Bristol University, UK m.b.taylor@bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/Received on 2008-08-19Z15:21:14