Re: question about Unicode

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@...>]

On Thu, Dec 07, 2006 at 06:03:42PM -0500, Russ Cox wrote:
> 5.  Applications whose job is text processing typically are easier
> working with internal arrays of characters rather than UTF-8
> (but they should still read and write UTF-8 externally!).
> The exact details of which data type you use to hold your
> character values is up to your application.  16-bit integer (if you
> don't care about the new Unicode points), 32-bit integer,
> and even double-precision floating point (if you use Lua)
> are all perfectly fine, with 16-bit being perhaps somewhat
> less than ideal (now that Unicode has bloated some)
> but still more efficient.

I've ported applications that use Lua to platforms with no 64-bit
floating point, so I don't like depending on lua_Number being double.
Fortunately, the Lua use wasn't very pervasive in the program at
the time and the problems were easily worked around.  I'll probably
change lua_Number to float even on x86 ports in the future, to catch
"storing large integers in floats" problems quickly.  (I think it
also makes stack alignment better.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard