Re: UTF-8 support for the ancient shell toys

[David Starner <dstarner98@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 03:53:45PM +1100, George W Gerrity wrote:
> What a cheek calling "the classic Bourne-style shell" "baroque" when 
> compared to Perl! 

Need we have language wars on this list?

> Lets face it. Perl is a powerful 4GL, and that's why people use it: 
> it is also better suited for CGI Scripts than its few contenders. 

Its few contenders? Almost any language can run a CGI script. What about
Python, Shell, Icon, Awk, Ruby, Lua, C, Java, Ada, and Fortran? (and
yes, I know someone who would probably do it in Fortran. 77, at that.)
Like Perl, hate it, it hasn't got where it is due to lack of
competitors.

> like Ada, it is so huge with so many ways to do the same thing that 
> you need to be using it every day just to exercise a quarter of its 
> warty features.

Ever programmed in Ada? Ada tends to be well-factored; your complaint
might be valid if you find having both generics and object-orientation
redundant, or both fixed point and floating point numbers redundant.

> Making "grep", "sort", "tr", etc. UTF-8-native is not going to be a 
> simple task, however, unless Unix/Linux/???BSD have full support, 
> including built-in collation-sequence routines and a more elaborate 
> locale structure than now seems to be supported.

What are the current problems with Linux's support? It has built-in
collation routines. How native do they need to be? sort and tr, at
least, ought to be doable with local-independent techniques.
 
-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each 
one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less."
- "Disciple", Stuart Davis
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/