Oh look, another language (ceylon)

[Chris Angelico]

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 12:31 AM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> Unless they have done something *really* clever, the language designers
> lose a hundred million points for screwing up text strings. There is
> *absolutely no excuse* for a new, modern language with no backwards
> compatibility concerns to choose one of the three bad choices:

Yeah, but this compiles to JS, so it does have that backward compat
issue - unless it's going to represent a Ceylon string as something
other than a JS string (maybe an array of integers??), which would
probably cost even more.

You're absolutely right, except in the premise that Ceylon is a new
and unshackled language. At least this way, if anyone actually
implements Ceylon directly in the browser, it can use something
smarter as its backend, without impacting code in any way (other than
performance). I'd much rather they go for O(n) string primitives than
maintaining the user-visible UTF-16 bug.

ChrisA