G. Adam Stanislav wrote:
> Why is it a problem? As long as each identifier is represented by the same
> sequence of bytes every time it is used,
But that's the tricky part. If we have as an identifier the word
"hétérogénéité", there are no less than 32 ways to express this
in Unicode, 31 of which will be rejected by a naive compiler. The
only valid one is, of course, the one used at the point of declaration.
The better approach is either to allow only prenormalized forms,
or for the compiler to do its own normalization. Both of these
require a not-huge table; the latter method means that the work has to
be done only once, with the compiler's sole responsibility that
of rejecting unnormalized forms.
> I happen to use my console in ISO-8859-2 mode.
This is not a parallel case, for 8859-2 has no combining marks
and thus has only one way of representing any given identifier.
-- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! / Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge / Politzer
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