🚀 go-pugleaf

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?



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