Re: Could Lua itself become UTF8-aware?

[Jay Carlson <nop@...>]

> On Apr 30, 2017, at 5:11 PM, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> wrote:
> 
> It was thus said that the Great Roberto Ierusalimschy once stated:
>>> [...] What's wrong with:
>>> 
>>> function 解決問題 ()
>>> end
> 
>  I don't have the right font installed to see the function name.

Which century are you in? OK, OK, I'll spot you another ten years. Which decade? :-)

More to the point, which environment is so minimal it doesn't have coverage for unified Han today? I was playing with a Raspberry Pi Zero, and the Raspbian default packaging is happy to display Chinese on Chinese web pages (or on English pages, for that matter.). I bet your *phone* can display world languages better than that environment. 

raspberrypi.org ships a meta-distro called NOOBS; it includes a Raspbian install image. That particular Raspbian build is missing the main Korean glyphs, called hangeul. Well, I mean it was missing them by default; I installed. 

If you are using a "pick everything yourself" distro you only have yourself to blame for those missing character boxes. Maybe you can blame the distro too, because the "install a reasonable GUI" target should include support for all text you will encounter. Minimal support could be display-only.

Not everybody is stuck on a subsidized $5+peripherals computer with an 8GB sdcard. The next step up from that for me is Lubuntu. Lubuntu LiveCDs cover display of all the big languages and some of the small.

IMO the software development world will have a lot to figure out about the "right" way to edit UTF-8. Remember, after n decades of C, we still have tab-vs-space warfare.

Jay