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on parrot strings

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From:
Jarkko Hietaniemi
Date:
January 17, 2002 20:21
Subject:
on parrot strings
Message ID:
20020118062107.J11674@alpha.hut.fi
Dan suggested that I make this document public.

I've been reluctant to do so, for several reasons, the most important
being that I'm far, FAR, behind in the current Parrot developments.

Therefore, this document will probably rudely stomp right over any
recent string, encoding and regular expression work that has been
going on. Its idea of vtables are just much handwaving, I really
don't know how vtables really work or how they are currently
implemented in Parrot.

However, I have spent some serious thought on this, based on the
appropriate amount of fun I've had lately with the Unicode in the
upcoming Perl 5.8, and some familiarity with the Unicode standard.

The most important message is that give up on 8-bit bytes, already.
Time to move on, chop chop.

The document itself is a collection (what we experts technically call
"a mess") of theory and practice: character model and statements about
how things should be, and how things should probably be implemented.
I've asked Larry about whether the ICU license would be compatible
with whatever Parrot will have, but he's currently cruising...

The bad (or good?) news is that I don't have the time to work
on this design document much more, maintain or develop it,
and certainly not implement any of it (another reason why I
have been reluctant to publish this).  But that's how it is.

-- 
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
        # There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
        # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen

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