On Tue, Jul 10, 2018, 9:00 AM Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com
<mailto:dirk.laurie@gmail.com>> wrote:
2018-07-10 15:30 GMT+02:00 Lorenzo Donati
<lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it <mailto:lorenzodonatibz@tiscali.it>>:
> Unicode is great for typesetting (I use regularly LaTeX and it's
fun to find
> almost every symbol you may imagine, even ancient German runic
scripts!),
> but it sucks (IMHO) for general programming or computer-related
stuff. Too
> much mind overhead to use correctly for little gain.
Yes, yes, but — if you will allow me to return to Lua and UTF-8 —
there would
be more gain for a programmer if we had (if it is not too late already
for Lua 5.4)
utf8 versions of find, sub, match, gsub, gmatch, reverse. Just
those, not asking
for upper/lower, operating only on simple codepoints, no combining
characters,
no need for a C library.
Utf8 != Unicode. It's an encoding; you don't get to pick a subset and
still claim Unicode support.
"Simple codepoints"? Does Unicode define that? If not, who decides
what that means? Zero-width space is pretty simple.
No combining chars? Ok, but that would not be Unicode. Practical
result: massive confusion and complaining. You cannot accept Unicode
and reject combining chars.
utf8.find ("Hélène",'n') --> 5 5
utf8.sub ("Hélène",5) --> 'ne'
utf8.gsub ("Hélène","[éè]","e") --> 'Helene' 2
utf8.reverse ("Hélène") --> 'enèléH'
