Re: question about Unicode

[David Given <dg@...>]

Glenn Maynard wrote:
[...]
> Out of curiosity, what use is that?  In particular, if a function
> returns a character offset, and you want to use it to address the string,
> you have to convert it to a byte offset--which is an expensive operation.
> I've used UTF-8 for years, and I can't remember the last time I wanted
> a character offset.  (Even if you use wide strings, you still don't
> get those directly, due to combining characters.)

I want to write a text editor, and so there'll be lots of nasty
fetch-the-character-from-column-Z issues. Assuming each grapheme cluster
renders into a single character cell --- which I know is not strictly valid,
as some clusters will occupy multiple cells --- then dealing with character
offsets instead of byte offsets will make life much easier.

-- 
╭─┈David Given┈──McQ─╮ "There are two major products that come out of
│┈┈dg@cowlark.com┈┈┈┈│ Berkeley: LSD and Unix. We don't believe this to be
│┈(dg@tao-group.com)┈│ a coincidence." --- Jeremy S. Anderson
╰─┈www.cowlark.com┈──╯

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