Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters
Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters
- Subject: Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters
- From: Elliotte Harold <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 10:22:40 -0400
A year or so ago I tried to convince BareBones to change the name of
their misleading "ASCII Table" menu item to something neutral like
"Character Table". They objected strenuously to classifying this as a
bug, and basically refused to change it.
I try to be really careful about using terms like these in my books
these days (not that I haven't made mistakes in the past) but a lot of
developers just don't want to be bothered with learning the technical
arcana that go into character set encodings. They just want to call
everything ASCII or Unicode, and be done with it. The resulting bugs in
their software are predictable.
Case in point: I recently discovered (and fixed) several Unicode-related
bugs in the Jaxen XPath engine. A couple of days later Google announced
AJAXSLT, a completely unrelated project written in a different language.
I scanned their source code and found (and reported) the exact same bugs
I'd just fixed in Jaxen.
These bugs are really predictable and really depressing. I doubt all
English-speaking developers will ever learn all the intricacies of
handling various character sets and encodings, but at least we should
demand better from teachers, authors, language designers, and tool
vendors. If they don't get this stuff right, what hope does the
developer learning from them have?
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold email@hidden
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
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