[Oberon] Oberon with strings, Eberon

[Lars]

On Mon, February 22, 2016 12:39 am, Jörg Straube wrote:
> Lars
>
>
> He does NOT get the string spinach!

At least he's working on it, no one says his implementation is finished,
it could be improved.

> Strings are more complex than it seems.
> What do you think the function call "length(str)" should return?
>

GoLang tries to solve this problem using Runes and Bytes rather than
chars, i.e. a new invention Rune tries to deal with the old char issue


>
> The main problem in implementing strings is the question: how to
> represent a character internally?

Again, GoLang tries to solve this question by runes..

My personal view is that internationalization, globalization, is a scam. I
prefer to stick with english characters and force people to stop using
silly complex languages that complicate programming further.

I am somewhat of a luddite, in the sense that I reject unicode, utf8, and
prefer to build my char by char parsers by avoiding unicode entirely.

Almost all of my website visitors and customers are english, even the
people who live in russia who I deal with speak english.. as do germans..
So I ignore the whole unicode scam.

However I respect the attempts of people to build utf8 and clever things
like it.... as they are trying to help the world. I feel it is a lost
cause and creates numerous bugs in software that would be elimintated if
we just stuck to the english alphabit. Whenever I talk to chinese business
people about products they speak english anyway, so what's the point of
having millions of stupid variations of languages and creating a computing
nightmare of having all these ridiculous characters that go up to literal
infinity? You can't solve an infinite problem, and that's what unicode is,
and it will never work as good as people are trying to make it work.

GoLang runes is a nice attempt, and may help quite a bit.  Problem is it
makes char by char parsers less simple and less readable than an old
program from 1970 that just dealt with english. i.e. unicode creates less
readable programs with more layers of obfuscations and silly
abstractions... not even abstractions, more like "kludges".

>
> The fork Eberon returns as length the number of 16 bit units.
> Unfortuntaly, there are characters (eg emojis) that need two of those 16
> bit units to be represented correctly.

That's why unicode and utf8 should die and go to hell because it is
infinitely complex and will never be solved by man.

Now I'm going to go back to my english char by char parser work... as I
don't have time for unicode! It's a joke... I've never truly built a
single international website in my life, it's always been english, nor
have I built a international shareware program... I rarely find a need.
IMO unicode is overhyped, overrated, and a nightmare for programmers.