Arc only supports Ascii. MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with it, and I don’t want to spend even one day dealing with character sets. Character sets are a black hole. I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that’s almost offensive […] But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn’t like Arc anyway.”
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Damn you and your snobby reality, Jacob!
Trust me, dude: what I published above is a hell of a lot more polite than the first draft.
I was pretty shocked when I read his logic: Guido lost a year to rewriting character set stuff, that's why I'm only supporting ASCII. What?!?!
It appears he has clarified his reasoning a little more on his arc website: http://arclanguage.org/item...
Ouch.
I wish you would have used that first draft. Unicode as the colour of the bike shed. That's rich.
I don't agree with your presumptive premise:
If one is not from US, UK, or AU then english is offensive. Huh?
Fred: I posted a quote, ten words, and a graph. From that you got to "[E]nglish is offensive"? Suffice to say you missed the point entirely.
"Guido lost a year to rewriting character set stuff"
Speaking as one of the two main implementers of Python's original Unicode subsystem, I can assure you all that Guido didn't lose much time on this.
(I wrote the string type and the RE engine. Marc-Andre Lemburg did integration and the codec system. The first version of the string type took a day, maybe two. A full Unicode system is a lot of work, but providing the basic plumbing that'll let you build the rest on top of it is no work at all.)
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