Unicode support

Lawson English english at primenet.com
Wed Sep 22 22:06:02 UTC 1999


Tim Rowledge <rowledge at interval.com> said:

>On Tue 21 Sep, Andrew C. Greenberg wrote:
>
>> A newbie recently asked how to compute the equivalent of:
>> 
>> 	word 4 of line 7
>> 
>> and
>> 
>> 	set word 4 of line 7 to "foobar"
>I haven't been tracking this discussion too thoroughly, but the above
point
>filtered through even though I haven't yet been caffeinated this morning.
>My claim is that the above sorts of action have nothing to do with String.
>Strings do not have lines, nor even words. Paragraphs (or just maybe
>FormattedSentences) have lines and words. A String is just a long list of
>characters. Linebreaks, words etc only have meaning once the string is
>formatted as part of a larger document-like concept.

So, where does the *display* of a String come in?

It is one thing to suggest that a String is only an arbitrary list of
characters, and another to suggest that ASCII-text handlers are all that
are needed to handle Unicode text-needs. At the least, one needs to keep
track of groupings of characters in different languages and accomidate the
cases of various languages.

How does one store a string of Hebrew text and numbers in a single
string-object?

Is it all one string or is it a collect of strings or what?

Again, everyone interested in these issues should check out the GX
Typography manual, which covers ALL the relevant issues for international
text, albeit for only one-line-at-a-time.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lawson English. Squeak, snore, etc.
Check out <http://www.squeak.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------------





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list