On 6/15/17 3:04 PM, L A Walsh wrote:
> Two problems with locale-based rules are:
>
> 1) they differ based on local convention, potentially,
> even down to what "side of the street" you live on, and
That's precisely what makes them valuable to users.
> 2) they don't account or allow for "data" (textual) outside
> of a given locale. For companies connected by an internet with
> international customers, having a non-uniform standard is a
> serious problem at best, and unworkable in practice.
We're not talking about `data' here. We're talking about characters that
can appear in shell identifier names. Don't try to muddy the issue.
>> A character that is classified as an alphanumeric in a particular locale,
>> but not in another, can lead to portability problems. That's what we're
>> debating here, not how something gets displayed in a text editor.
>>
> That's already a problem in that I try to use a letter from
> the Greek alphabet, in a var name, and it doesn't work. The
> current code doesn't recognize letters outside some limited
> POSIX-defined range. That's very constraining.
Please. The entire scope of this discussion is how to lift that
constraint.
>
>
>>> How is having UTF-8 for files and text not showing
>>> respect?
>> Look at the the issue with different locales classifying
>> characters as alphanumerics differently, and how that would impact
>> variable names incorporating locale-specific characters in `portable'
>> scripts.
>>
> ---
> Can you give an example? AFAIK, most locals that allow
> international letters are already using the unicode definitions. I
> don't know of any locale that supports internationalized characters
> that don't use the unicode rules.
>
> Do you have an example of different internationalized locales
> that use different character-class rules, cuz I don't know of any.
I said I didn't, since I'm not multi-lingual, but could imagine a scenario
where an "alphabetic" in, say, cyrillic is not an alphabetic in en_US.
That's a portability problem.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU [email protected] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
