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  1. Return-Path: <icon-group-sender>
  2. Received: from kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU (kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU [192.12.69.239])
  3.     by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with SMTP id IAA06186
  4.     for <icon-group-addresses@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>; Mon, 14 Sep 1998 08:22:29 -0700 (MST)
  5. Received: by kingfisher.CS.Arizona.EDU (5.65v4.0/1.1.8.2/08Nov94-0446PM)
  6.     id AA01505; Mon, 14 Sep 1998 08:22:02 -0700
  7. Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1998 17:38:15 -0700
  8. From: Gregg Townsend <gmt>
  9. Message-Id: <9809120038.AA13184@hawk.CS.Arizona.EDU>
  10. To: icon-group
  11. Subject: Re: Unicode support or support for non-ASCII based character ma
  12. Errors-To: icon-group-errors@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
  13. Status: RO
  14.  
  15. Using 16-bit characters in Jcon would be possible, and I don't think
  16. it would necessarily incur a huge performance penalty.  What's hard
  17. is redesigning the Icon language to support Unicode.  For example:
  18.  
  19.     --    In Unicode, there aren't just 26 lower-case letters, and
  20.     they're not all contiguous.  What should &lcase contain?
  21.     How would this affect existing programs?
  22.  
  23.     --    How should output be handled?  If a non-ASCII character is
  24.     written, should it be encoded in UTF8?  What about existing
  25.     programs that write 8-bit ISO-Latin-1 characters and don't
  26.     expect any such encoding?
  27.  
  28. The design work is the hard part.
  29.  
  30.    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  31.    Gregg Townsend              Gould-Simpson Building   gmt@cs.arizona.edu
  32.    Staff Scientist             1040 E. 4th St.          32 13 45N  110 57 16W
  33.    Dept. of Computer Science   PO Box 210077            tel: +1 520 621 4325
  34.    The University of Arizona   Tucson, AZ  85721-0077   fax: +1 520 621 4246
  35.