Re: GSoC 2010 Project Ideas

[Jacques Chester <jacques@...>]

On 06/02/2010, at 4:52 PM, Majic wrote:

> I *really* wish Lua strings were not byte-by-byte operated-on.....wish
> unicode-safe operations were safe in the string "namespace".  Wish
> that were a GSoC Lua project...never done GSoC, so I don't know how
> it's done. :(  Oh well, hopefully someone else feels similarly?  Lua
> is fantastic but does anyone think character arrays cut it?  I think
> wchar_t is only big enough to fit the character for the current
> locale...  Would sleep safer at night if it at least supported that.

I think this question / observation / wish is so commonly
stated that Lua should output a link to the relevant FAQ
entry every time you call a function that handles strings.

But the very short answers are
1. You can get seamless unicode support from multiple libraries, and
2. Unicode is not included in ANSI C and is therefore outside
of Lua's stated compatibility target.

I do not mean to insult you as I once wondered the same thing;
but within Lua's heritage the decision is perfectly logical.

Cheers,

JC.