I interview Simon about his latest book: Advanced Perl Programming, 2nd Edition.
localhost?
Ovid on 2005-05-16T18:26:59
I think you have a link to fix.
Re:localhost?
brian_d_foy on 2005-05-16T18:31:38
Yeah, within half a minute of posting, I got three IMs about it. I guess people read my journal. :)
I copied the link from my testing server instead of the production version.
Re:localhost?
cog on 2005-05-17T11:12:52
I guess people read my journal
Actually, we're just part of a link-testing team.
Unicode's image problem
drhyde on 2005-05-17T09:45:15
Simon makes a good point about Unicode's image problem, but ascribes it to the wrong reasons. Those of us in English-speaking countries do, believe it or not, speak other languages than just English. I speak (and write) three languages which can't be represented in ASCII (four if you count the rarely used æ and œ ligatures in English itself, or spellings like coöperate and naïve) and am vaguely familiar with several others including Arabic. Unicode is a great idea, but I rarely use it because there are some fundamental implementation problems, including in perl.
The big one is that the use of variable-width encodings is Just Plain Stupid, plus there's a plethora of incompatible fixed-width encodings of Unicode subsets. End result - a host of incompatible implementations none of which Do The Right Thing. This means that for some of my mailing lists I have to use one MUA and for others another. I can sometimes edit text written in German and sometimes not. And god forbid that I might want to edit a file that contains English, Old English, and German!
Then look at exactly what is in Unicode. Yes, there's Japanese and Arabic and all the funky characters for writing in Polish and what have you. But then for no apparent reason there's a picture of a snowman! A selection of geometric shapes! I assume that they came out of the same session with the crack pipe as the multiple variable width encodings did.
