[PD] Announce: pdstring v0.08 + locale v0.01

[Bryan Jurish]

morning all,

As of yesterday, a new version of [pdstring] is available on SVN and
from me (http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~moocow/projects/pd).  Following
the discussion ensuing from my recent "request for objections", I
weaseled some wide-character support into the [pdstring] representation
with new objects ([bytes2wchars], [wchars2bytes]) and abstractions
([any2wchars], [wchars2any]).  The old [any2string] and [string2any] are
now [any2bytes] and [bytes2any], with the old names still working as
aliases.

In order for the wide character support to do anything useful, you'll
need to call setlocale(LC_CTYPE,...) to determine how byte strings are
to be interpreted.  For this, I've written a quick & dirty external
[locale], which has stunning potential for disaster (see the help file
for one scenario), but does what it should.

I'm still toying with Miller's suggestion of array-based persistent
strings, but I haven't found a good solution yet: either we access and
re-interpret g_array's data vector (safe at runtime, but gets mangled on
save & reload), or we're limited to 24-bit values which t_float can
losslessly encode.  The latter is more compatible with other pd tools
([tabread], [tabwrite], zexy's [tabset], [tabdump]), but the former
would make wrapping C functions a lot more comfortable... ideas, anyone?

marmosets,
	Bryan

-- 
Bryan Jurish                           "There is *always* one more bug."
jurish at ling.uni-potsdam.de      -Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology