Unicode Support in Ruby, Perl, Python, Emacs Lisp

[David Kastrup]

Sean McAfee <eefacm at gmail.com> writes:

> Xah Lee <xahlee at gmail.com> writes:
>> Perl's exceedingly lousy unicode support hack is well known. In fact
>> it is the primary reason i “switched” to python for my scripting needs
>> in 2005. (See: Unicode in Perl and Python)
>
> I think your assessment is antiquated.  I've been doing Unicode
> programming with Perl for about three years, and it's generally quite
> wonderfully transparent.
>
> On the programmers' web site stackoverflow.com, I flag questions with
> the "unicode" tag, and of questions that mention a specific language,
> Python and C++ seem to come up the most often.
>
>> I'll have to say, as far as text processing goes, the most beautiful
>> lang with respect to unicode is emacs lisp. In elisp code (e.g.
>> Generate a Web Links Report with Emacs Lisp ), i don't have to declare
>> none of the unicode or encoding stuff. I simply write code to process
>> string or buffer text, without even having to know what encoding it
>> is. Emacs the environment takes care of all that.
>
> It's not quite perfect, though.  I recently discovered that if I enter a
> Chinese character using my Mac's Chinese input method, and then enter
> the same character using a Japanese input method, Emacs regards them as
> different characters, even though they have the same Unicode code point.
> For example, from describe-char:
>
>   character: 一 (43323, #o124473, #xa93b, U+4E00)
>   character: 一 (55404, #o154154, #xd86c, U+4E00)
>
> On saving and reverting a file containing such text, the characters are
> "normalized" to the Japanese version.
>   
> I suppose this might conceivably be the correct behavior, but it sure
> was a surprise that (equal "一" "一") can be nil.

Your headers state:

User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.3 (darwin)

That's an old version of Emacs, more than 2 years old.  23.1 has been
released more than a year ago.  The current version is 23.2.

-- 
David Kastrup