Re: Encodings of string literals; explicit codepoint escapes?

At 17:30 07/08/31, gga wrote:
>Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>> or possible alternative in the distant future may be:
>>   m = "\343\201\276\343\201\244\343\202\202\343\201\250".utf8
>>   m = "\343\201\276\343\201\244\343\202\202\343\201\250"u
>>   m = "\343\201\276\343\201\244\343\202\202\343\201\250"e:utf8
>> 
>
>Matz, for what it's worth, the .utf8 is okay,

For general encodings, I'd prefer a fully object-oriented syntax,
along the lines of
    m = "\343\201\276\343\201\244\343\202\202\343\201\250".encoding("abc-de")
For raw (binary), utf-8,  and possibly EUC-JP and Shift-JIS, I think
having a method without parameters is a good shortcut.

>Also, at least to me, assuming a long string without a heredoc, it makes it hard to read (as the intent is not clear till the end).

I think that's something that can often happen in Ruby,
and to some extent, program writers know to take care of.
But I think it would be good to have some alternative functional
syntax, such as

a = encoding "abc-de", "\343\201\276\343\201\244\343\202\202\343\201\250"

>For me, at least, it would look much more logical to have the encoding first:
>
>a = u"...." or
>a = utf8:""
>
>as it makes the intent of the string more clear.  I am also not to fond of python's approach, but I don't think placing the encoding at the end is better.

Python really needs the u"..." because a string can't be Unicode
(in their case UTF-16 or UTF-32) and ASCII-compatible at the same
time. In Ruby's case, using UTF-8 means that there should be much,
much less need for such explicit flags. Combined with the fact
that O-O syntax works even for literals in Ruby (no clue whether
that's possible in Python) means that the need for special syntax
of this kind should be very, very low.

Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:[e-mail]