Re: [dev] Fwd: OT:GUI wireless connections management?

On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 05:47:45PM +0100, Ethan Grammatikidis wrote:
>
> On 30 May 2010, at 17:16, Kris Maglione wrote:
>
>> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 06:09:02PM +0200, Uriel wrote:
>>> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Kris Maglione
>>> <maglione.k_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 11:36:44AM -0400, Kurt H Maier wrote:
>>>>> FreeBSD doesn't support UTF-8 in the console. It only does UTF-8
>>>>> in X11.
>>>>
>>>> Well, the point is that it does UTF-8 in libc, which is always the
>>>> real
>>>> issue.
>>>
>>> Uh! No, libc has the wchar abomination, which should *never* be used.
>>>
>>> The issue is having decent tools to work with text that support UTF-8
>>> clearly and efficiently, and Plan 9 from User Space provides by far
>>> the best solution for this, even on Linux.
>>
>> You're funny.
>
> The existence and prevalent use of an interface does not necessarily
> indicate that interface is a good one. wchar() is made to graft utf8
> onto systems which have their roots in the 1970s. Some operating system
> research has been done since, not much, but some, and Plan 9 is the
> product of some of that research.

Well, that's a very specific response to a very general "You're
funny". All that was meant was, well, he's funny.

But if you want to get into that, first of all, wchar_t is
almost identical in purpose and implementation to Plan 9's Rune.
It doesn't even have any appreciable relation to the locale
charset. It's always a 16-32 bit unicode codepoint, regardless
of the locale encoding. As for the rest of the encoding issues,
they're tied to an encoding-agnostic ctype, string, and stdio
library. Those bits of the library handle conversion to wchars,
just like Plan 9's utf and fmt libraries handle conversion to
Runes. The only difference is that you need to treat char*
strings as having an opaque encoding with arbitrary character
boundaries.

Yes, it's more complicated than Plan 9, along with slower and
less convenient. The only thing it really has going for it is
that it allows certain nationalities to, by and large, use more
compact encodings for their languages, which probably causes
more trouble than it's worth when it comes to text interchange.

None of which has anything to do with the fact that uriel is
funny.

-- 
Kris Maglione
Insane people are always sure that they are fine.  It is only the sane
people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.
	--Nora Ephron