Comments on: Unicode and Arc

By: Paul Prescod

Paul Prescod — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:45:01 +0000

You said: “My point is not that Python or Ruby can’t, just that Arc supports Unicode at least as well as they do—and apparently somewhat better.”

After I said: “Support of Unicode in source code files is the least important aspect of it. It doesn’t affect users of the application at all.”

But you didn’t address my point at all. If I were writing the next great internationalized word processor or social network why would I care whether I could use accent characters in method names?

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 22:05:02 +0000

Following the instructions at http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/, Python still fails when run with the following:

# coding: utf-8
def á():
	return "á"

Maybe it can be made to work, or maybe not; I don’t really know. My point is not that Python or Ruby can’t, just that Arc supports Unicode at least as well as they do—and apparently somewhat better.

By: Paul Prescod

Paul Prescod — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:51:41 +0000

Support of Unicode in source code files is the least important aspect of it. It doesn’t affect users of the application at all.

By: da

da — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:38:09 +0000

if you add “coding=utf-8″ in a comment in any python file it will work too.

By: David N. Welton

David N. Welton — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:29:50 +0000

And lest anyone forget Tcl, it handles the example just fine, and has for a number of years.

By: Michiel de Mare

Michiel de Mare — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 10:45:55 +0000

For ruby 1.8, try: ruby -Ku foo.rb

I had lambda aliased as λ for a while in 1.8. Worked fine (but was hard to type and looked ugly in textmate.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:43:08 +0000

Fair point. I’ve updated the post.

By: markus

markus — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:35:13 +0000

I’d just like to point out that your Ruby example works with Ruby 1.9:

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.9.0 (2007-12-25 revision 14709) [i686-darwin9.1.0]
$ cat > foo.rb
def ô
“ô”
end
puts ô
$ ruby foo.rb
ô

By: Patrick

Patrick — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:49:37 +0000

It comes from MzScheme, sure—but the source of the support doesn’t change the fact that it’s present. And hey, even CLISP’s excellent Unicode support comes largely from libiconv.

By: sztywny

sztywny — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 08:36:41 +0000

Except, it isn’t Arc’s Unicode support, but MzScheme’s.