🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan7.033153.12133@fcom.cc.utah.edu>, terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
> 
> Consider a newline terminated text database containing fixed length lines,
> or consider a database consisting of variant text records in fixed fields.
> In either case, the amount of data per field is now variant on Runic encoding.
> For instance, if we accept the Plan-9 soloution, an application used in
> both England and the US will vary as to how much data is representable per
> fixed field based on whether or not that data contains the English "#"
> character.  This gets worse the further you get from base ASCII coding.

Using Plan 9 utf you know the maximum size in bytes that a Rune can
be encoded into.  Fixed fields only have to be a multiple of this value,
defined to be to be UTFmax.  So where's the problem?

We can take this piece of code as working example (ie. functioning)
which takes an array of Runes, encodes them and then calls write
to send them in a reasonably efficient manner (ie 1 Rune != 1 write):

    void
    sendrunes(Rune *r, ulong len)
    {
        char    s[128 * UTFmax];

        while (len)
        {
            char    *p;

            for (p = s; p <= &s[sizeof s - UTFmax] && len; len--)
            {
                 int     n;

                 n = runetochar(p, r++);
                 p += n;
            }

            (void)write(fd, s, p - s);
        }
     }

Runes are your friend.


Boyd Roberts			boyd@prl.dec.com

``When the going gets wierd, the weird turn pro...''