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Re: linebreak in a shell script; was Re: What's wrong with this call to zip?
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Re: linebreak in a shell script; was Re: What's wrong with this call to zip?


  • Subject: Re: linebreak in a shell script; was Re: What's wrong with this call to zip?
  • From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>
  • Date: Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:28:15 -0500

On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Shane Stanley
<email@hidden> wrote:
> On 1/3/08 12:05 AM, "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
>  > So AppleScript now uses "character" in a way that doesn't match the
>  > Unicode Standard.
>
>  The use of it for CRLF might be different, but I'm not sure the concept is.

The concept is fine; my complaint is with the fact that the language
now uses "character" to refer to a grapheme cluster, which is more
than a little confusing and defeats the reason for coining the term
"grapheme cluster" in the first place.

Actually, that's not even true; it now conflates grapheme clusters and
scalar values, using "character" to mean both, with the result that
asking for the id of a single character can sometimes return a list of
values.

Not that I think they should have gone with "grapheme cluster" as a
language keyword instead; yuck.  Rather, I think they should have
stuck with "character" meaning something a little further down, like a
scalar value.  A grapheme cluster is arguably too high-level for use
in an API; it's more of an end-user convenience thing.

>  "In those relatively rare circumstances where programmers need to supply end
>  users with character counts, the counts should correspond to the number of
>  segments delimited by grapheme cluster boundaries."

Ah, but an AppleScript programmer is not an end user.  An Applescript
programmer is, in fact, a programmer, who belongs on the other end of
that transaction. There's a difference between a user asking for the
length of a word and a programmer trying to extract substrings to do
text manipulation.


--
Mark J. Reed <email@hidden>
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  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: linebreak in a shell script; was Re: What's wrong with this call to zip?
      • From: Christopher Nebel <email@hidden>
    • Re: linebreak in a shell script; was Re: What's wrong with this call to zip?
      • From: Shane Stanley <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Re: linebreak in a shell script; was Re: What's wrong with this call to zip? (From: "Mark J. Reed" <email@hidden>)
 >Re: linebreak in a shell script; was Re: What's wrong with this call to zip? (From: Shane Stanley <email@hidden>)

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