Re:How UTF-8 Works
by junon on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @12:40AM
(#30269309)
Getting tired of people calling things "useless". Clearly I have a usecase for fixed width text encodings.
Source code manipulation is frequently Unicode aware but doesn't care about combinations or things outside of a strict subset of Unicode to modify lexing control flow.
Being able to store (and later refer to) character offsets in the source code is a plus because they'll only ever occur in places where the strict subset is enforced.
This is especially true of languages with line-only comments, etc, where different writing systems being used won't affect the error message information.
Like I said, there are a few useful cases where having a fixed width encoding is beneficial. It's less helpful to the discussion to assert you know better for every case, ever.
Source code manipulation is frequently Unicode aware but doesn't care about combinations or things outside of a strict subset of Unicode to modify lexing control flow.
Being able to store (and later refer to) character offsets in the source code is a plus because they'll only ever occur in places where the strict subset is enforced.
This is especially true of languages with line-only comments, etc, where different writing systems being used won't affect the error message information.
Like I said, there are a few useful cases where having a fixed width encoding is beneficial. It's less helpful to the discussion to assert you know better for every case, ever.