Late-binding of function defaults (was Re: What is a function parameter =[] for?)

[BartC]

On 26/11/2015 13:15, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 11:53 PM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:

>> http://pastebin.com/JrVTher6

> #14 and #15: Are you assuming that a character is a byte and that
> diacritical-free English is the only language in the world?

I don't think that need be the assumption. Any UTF8 string that fits 
within 8 bytes could also be represented by an integer value.

> Case
> insensitivity is a *pain* when you try to be language-agnostic; for
> instance, the case-folding rules of English state that U+0069 LATIN
> SMALL LETTER I and U+0049 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I are identical, but
> Turkish would upper-case the first to U+0130 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I
> WITH DOT ABOVE and lower-case the second to U+0131 LATIN SMALL LETTER
> DOTLESS I. German has U+00DF LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S (also called
> eszett), which traditionally upper-cases to "SS", which lower-cases to
> "ss".

I use Windows which is also case insensitive with regard to filenames 
and such. How does it solve those problems? How about web-site names, 
email addresses and Google searches?

Within a program source code (where you have mainly technical users), 
you can just impose some restrictions on keywords and identifiers 
otherwise there are plenty of problems even without case switching, if 
you want to allow Unicode here.


-- 
Bartc