Re: LONGCHAR proposal

[Michael van Acken <acken@vanacken.do.uunet.de>]

> From: "Eric W. Nikitin" <enikitin@apk.net>
> Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1999 10:55:53 -0500 (EST)
> 
> Michael van Acken wrote:
> > Currently OOC implements CAP only for ASCII, and is the identity
> > operation for chars in the range 80X..FFX.  Is anyone in favor of
> > extending capitalization to the full ISO latin-1 range?
> 
> Sounds good to me.  This doesn't make CAP locale dependant, does it?

I don't think so.  It will make CAP slower, but I think we can life
with the slowdown.  Now, does anything have a mapping from lower to
upper case characters for the upper half of the iso-latin-1 character
set?  Otherwise this discussion is quite pointless.

> > If KSCRider maps to the Unicode character encoding, these two would be
> > share most, if not all, of their interface.  Fixing the interface in
> > an abstract class is a good idea to formalize this.
> 
> All right.  
> 
> 
> What I'll do now is revise the proposal to take into account all that
> has been discussed, and then I'll repost it.  

> I'd also like to further discuss the specification of the abstract
> mapper class for UnicodeRider, etc.  Would this AcMapper class be
> the parent for both TextRider and UnicodeRider?  (That is, aren't
> the interfaces for TextRider and UnicodeRider the same, or almost
> the same?)

I don't think LONGCHAR should appear in the module interface of
`TextRider'.  It is much easier to duplicate its functionality in a
separate module that deals exclusively with LONGCHAR, instead of
kludging it into `TextRider'.

And without LONGCHAR in `TextRider' it is impossible to have a common
"UnicodeMapper" (or whatever) super class that includes and string
functions.  A question: Could we derive `KSCRider' from a concrete
class `UnicodeRider'?  The answer would be "yes" if we define
`KSCRider' to just map from KSC encoding to Unicode and vice versa.
Here "encoding" means both the encoding of n bit values in byte
streams, and translation of character codes between the two standards.

-- mva