[M3devel] This disgusting TEXT business

[Dragiša Durić]

Whole bussiness of mixed TEXT's - concat of TEXT and WIDETEXT is either
slow, or produces results that make subsequent operations slow - is
where problem is with this implementation.

IMO, best solution would be to replace internal representation with
UTF-8. For whom may be concerned with it - make some external widechar
conversion routines available.

That way - concat would be as fast as it can be made and other
operations would be realistic - it is how almost everybody does their
Unicode strings, after all. Almost everybody - excluding mobile industry
and Microsoft :-), AFAIK.

Compiler changes would make transparent conversion of literals.
Everything else is already transparent with regard to internal
representation.

I've sent some UTF-8 routines ages ago to Olaf. IIRC, he was reluctant
to accept them as he did not believe C base routines were widespread
enough. GNU world has no such reluctance. Everything is UTF8.

If nobody can fill this job in next few weeks, I will probably have some
time this winter. No promise, of course, but list will know :-).

dd

On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 19:26 +1100, Tony Hosking wrote:
> Hmm, are we just victims of poor implementation?  Does anyone have the  
> time to improve things?  It would be possible to rip out CM3 TEXT and  
> replace with PM3, but we'd lose WIDECHAR and WideText.T with that  
> too.  Not sure who that impacts.
> 
> On 20 Dec 2008, at 18:19, Mika Nystrom wrote:
> 
> > Hello Modula-3ers,
> >
> > I have gone on the record before as not being very impressed by the
> > Critical Mass implementation of TEXT.
> >

-- 
Dragiša Durić <dragisha at m3w.org>