Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!lanl!opus!ted From: ted@nmsu.edu (Ted Dunning) Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog Subject: Re: Non-ASCII characters, suggestion and question Message-ID: Date: 15 Oct 89 18:20:42 GMT References: <2422@munnari.oz.au> <2432@munnari.oz.au> Sender: news@nmsu.edu Organization: NMSU Computer Science Lines: 39 In-reply-to: ok@cs.mu.oz.au's message of 15 Oct 89 10:31:55 GMT In article <2432@munnari.oz.au> ok@cs.mu.oz.au (Richard O'Keefe) writes: We cannot use this scheme, because too many of the sequences are already in use. The ?` and !` ligatures in TeX would be particularly painful to add to Prolog. prolog's difficulty in dealing with the european character sets is nothing compared with the genuine antipathy with which it regards oriental character sets. for instance, in quintus, put strips the high bit of characters being output, and the contents of string literals are stripped of their high bits by the guts of read. this leads to real pain in trying to write a program which has embedded chinese or japanese characters in it. of course, the real fix is not to just put in a hack which avoids all this gratuitous bit stripping. what should be done is to start supporting characters as a data type distinct from integers, both from tiny character sets such as used by the european languages, and from larger character sets such as chinese, japanese, korean, and the indic languages. The thing which *really* makes it unacceptable is that it has no way of expressing some of the characters which ARE in the ISO 8859/1 character set, such as eth and thorn, guillemots, Yen sign, ... that is only the beginning. why admit there is such a thing as a yen if you won't admit that kanji exists? -- ted@nmsu.edu Dem Dichter war so wohl daheime In Schildas teurem Eichenhain! Dort wob ich meine zarten Reime Aus Veilchenduft und Mondenschein