Its nice to see that IBM developerworks isn't purely java - the latest in their 'Cultured Perl' series covers Inversion Lists and looks quite good.
CulturedPerl
inkdroid on 2003-10-28T15:02:16
Thanks for noting the cultured perl column...I had no idea it existed.
Good article, but...
jhi on 2003-10-29T13:19:57
...it contains some confusing information:
> [inversion lists]
... especially for those who deal with ranges and Unicode.
Well, you can do ranges and Unicode perfectly well in Perl 5 (or 6, for that matter), without having to know anything about inversion lists.
Don't get me wrong: inversion lists are a cool data structure, and the article is fine, and the Cultured Perl series is worth following.
Inversion lists are a neat concept that happens to match the data of Unicode character database rather nicely. Hopefully one day inversion lists will be used in the Perl 6 (Parrot, really) implementation, by using the IBM's ICU library for Unicode, which does use inversion lists written in C(++). But this will be invisible to the user of Parrot/Perl 6.
Perl 5 uses neither ICU nor inversion lists for its Unicode.
To summarize: don't think that you need knowledge of inversion lists to use Unicode in Perl, either in Perl 5 or Perl 6. But feel free to use inversion lists for other cool stuff. (One cool thing would be to make Perl 5 to use inversion lists to implement its Unicode character classes instead of the current scheme. But do read up on your Lovecraft before taking a look at the current scheme.)
Re:Good article, but...
tzz on 2004-01-05T19:10:33
Heh, I always get grief for the article blurbs.
Those are written by the IBM editors, and I don't see them until the article is published. Usually they are OK, but (as in this example) they say something that's not... well... exactly the way I would say it :)
Ted
