[PD] request for objections: any2string -> unsigned char

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Unicode would be great, if someone wants to implement that in Pd, I  
would fully support that.

As for the simple question of unsigned versus signed for any2string, I  
have never heard of using negative values for chars, so it makes  
perfect sense to me to use 0-255.  That'll will give at least the full  
latin charset.

.hc

On Jan 15, 2009, at 12:45 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Bryan Jurish wrote:
>
>> Unicode might be more immediately intuitive to most users, but when  
>> it
>> comes down to it, byte-strings are IMHO the more basic  
>> representation (a
>> char* is still a char*, even in this post-unicode world).
>
> What happened is that people switched to UTF-8 instead of some fixed- 
> size encoding because many apps that assume that a character is a  
> byte will work anyway. Just don't ask those apps to say how many  
> characters there are in a string though. You have to pretend that  
> all the "special" characters are pairs of characters instead (when  
> they are not triplets).
>
>> A good string handling mechanism should have a good general default  
>> representation (e.g. as UTF-${MachineWordBits}), but should  
>> likewise allow access to "raw" byte strings, and be able to  
>> accommodate various encodings.  Not that I'm really hankering to  
>> write any of that, mind you ;-) Perhaps a better name for the  
>> external as I think of it would be [any2bytes].  I'm perfectly  
>> willing to cede the "string" name to something better (Martin's  
>> string patch comes to mind),
>
> I gather that it'll take a long time before Pd gets unicode support...
>
>> ... except if you're building rsp. reading a persistent index for a
>> large file, in which case tell() & seek() are likely to be a wee bit
>> faster than parsing and counting variable-length-encoded  
>> characters ...
>
> right.
>
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