[Melbourne-pm] Next Melbourne PM meeting, Wednesday 8th February

[Toby Corkindale]

That sounds like an interesting talk.

Some days, I wonder if MS and co had a point with their adoption of 
UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 -- because it forces you to make everything work 
with it. Simple ASCII isn't valid UTF-16 at all, so you'll find the 
mistakes in your code quicker.

Downsides are, of course, that it's a pain to handle in just about 
everything for the same reasons :)

On 21/01/12 10:43, Jacinta Richardson wrote:
> G'day lovely people,
>
> I don't know where the next meeting will be, but I'd be happy to give
> the following talk thereat (my OPL mini conf talk at LCA this year).
>
>
>     Don't hate Unicode
>
> Unicode sneaks into the most unexpected places. Do you ever wonder if
> your life would be much, much easier if your default encoding was not
> ASCII? Do you know what the difference between UTF-8 and Unicode strings
> are? Do you know what your default encoding is, or how to change it?
> Does it all seem to hard, and make you resent anything to do with the
> locale?
>
> If 7-bit ASCII was good enough for me, it should be good enough for you!
> Have you been left behind with this whole Unicode thing to the point
> that you're confused and resentful of the whole thing? I know I was.
> When your name, and everything you write works wonderfully in ASCII it
> can be hard to summon the enthusiasm to learn about Unicode, even when
> you know that you should be handling your data better.
>
> Imagine your code is using a logging library, that expects strings. What
> does it do when you pass it a Unicode object? It'll probably write it,
> encoding it in your default encoding (probably ASCII). And it'll
> probably work, on all of your test cases, and on most of your data.
> Until someone comes on with a non-ASCII character in their name, and
> causes your code to throw an exception. You probably weren't expecting
> it, it might not even be your library. Unicode works implicitly often
> enough that Unicode can sneak in well before you realise your code isn't
> robust enough to handle it.
>
> This talk will cover the essentials of Unicode and how it affects things
> like regular expressions.
>
>
>
>
>
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> Melbourne-pm at pm.org
> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/melbourne-pm


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