Re: Will Lua kernel use Unicode in the future?

[Chris Marrin <chris@...>]

Asko Kauppi wrote:
> ..keeping my fingers out of the hot oven, but..
>
> local str= "This might be in Kanji: "..U(1234)..U(5678).." is that  
> enough? :)"

Yes, that would of course work, too. But that's lots of noise compared 
to: "This might be in Kanji:\u+1234\u+5678", IMHO.

Note that, according to the unicode spec 'u' and 'U' are not equivalent. 
'u' expects 4 hex digits, allowing for a UCS16 character, while 'U' 
expects 8 hex digits, for a UCS32 character. But that's just for parsing 
the string. In UTF8 \U+00001234 and \u+1234 produce the same sequence.


> I don't oppose the \U, no I don't. If they do it, also \x (hex input)  
> should be in..

Agreed, although Lua already supports '\123' for decimal literals. 
Unlike C, the number here is interpreted as decimal rather than octal. 
Not a bad diff, considering how obsolete octal is! Hex notation would 
merely be a convenience for representing single characters. The nice 
thing about \u is that it actually does some grungy work for you. Today 
you could enter this:

    "This is a summation character: \226\136\145"

and a console that understood UTF8 would show a summation characer. But 
to do this I had to:

- Use to the Character Map utility to find the character
- Copy that character into OpenOffice, which understands Unicode
- Save the file as UTF8
- Open the file as binary in MsDev
- Hand convert the character sequence to UTF8
- Use Calculator to convert the result into decimal

It would be nice if Lua could do this for me :-)

--
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"As a general rule,don't solve puzzles that open portals to Hell"'