Re: Strange crash on custom iterator

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On 2018-07-04 21:53, Shark8 wrote:

> But let's take a step backward; what about displaying the text? One certainly could argue that Unicode is a good solution in this arena, after all havng the ability to encode all of human language is it's stated design-goal, so surely it must be well-suited to that, right?

Some written languages, some human, some formal.

> Not really.
> The mere fact of "combining characters" makes unicode no more suited to textual display than a sort of hypothetical Forth/PostScript where each word/token/character is processed by the display driver and rendered appropriately. (The aforementioned Lisp-like structure being executed is the procedure: "painting/displaying the english text, switch-to-hebrew, print/display hebrew text, switch-to-english, print/display english text", which of course can be further decomposed to "print 'T' [horizontal-stroke, vertical stroke] print 'h' [vertical stroke, curved stroke, vertical stroke] print 'e' [horizontal stroke, curved stroke] ....")

Written languages evolve in order to adapt to the methods of writing. 
Many old methods do not fit well into Unicode. And, honestly, Unicode 
tried way too much to embrace things better to drop.

I miss ASCII times, really. It forced English (and nobody cared about 
correct spelling of the word naïve (:-)) [*]

> Arguably it's stupid for a single-language system, too. As an example we could use paths: "root\projects\x\source" is flatly moronic*, and we can see this by how it pops up in multi-platform development: should there be a terminal '\'? do those '\' characters need escaped? do they need to be replaced with '/'? What we have is a sequence (root, projects, x, source) which corresponds to a path down a tree, but the common "industry practice" is to think of this as a string of characters and "parse/reparse/regex/reparse/whatever" textual manipulations to read what the structure is rather than sensibly save the structural information.

Textual representation is ambiguous and this has nothing to do with the 
text, but with its meaning. Path is ambiguous and its meaning (the 
target file) is even more ambiguous. If you want it less ambiguous use 
sector and block numbers and color stickers to mark hard drives. What 
about 001 vs 1 vs 3/2 ... infinite list follows.

Meaning of a text is not the text itself. It is a fallacy. The meaning 
of a numeric literal is not the literal itself. The meaning of a Unicode 
string has nothing to do with Unicode. And, fundamentally, there is an 
infinite hierarchy of object-meta languages that never ends in some 
ultimate, final "Om", expressing everything and nothing.

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* Do Chinese still write top-to-bottom?

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de