Re: Plea for the support of unicode escape sequences

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

On 28/06/2011 21.49, Ico wrote:
> * On Tue Jun 28 21:08:10 +0200 2011, Edgar Toernig wrote:
>
> > As it's the last chance for probably 5 or 6 years to ask for it:
> >
> > Could the next version have support for Unicode escape sequences?
> > (like "A smiley: \u263a, an en-dash: \u2013, an ellipsis: \u2026")
>
> Could you just not enter the literal UTF-8 symbol into your strings?
> Any decent editor supports UTF-8 these days, so there should be no need
> for special encoding of these characters ? ☺ is easier to read then
> \u263a, imho.

I see two problems:

1. sometimes two different glyphs may seem the same (think as a 3rd 
millenium version of "don't put uppercase Os where they can be mistaken 
for 0s"). Or they may look different, but in different ways on different 
systems.

2. even if you have an editor capable of displaying and entering glyphs, 
you may lack the appropriate fonts. Don't assume the files containing 
Unicode chars are always opened for viewing/editing on the same system 
where they were created.

Unicode escape sequences are platform independent. They are useful for 
the same reasons why ASCII codes are useful, at least for people working 
with Unicode.

> Ico

-- Lorenzo