Re: Unicode Support


Hi Darran,

| That seems to be what's happening... Great in theory, but trying to
| make it happen, well that's another story.

:) As usual, don't give up too early.

| > *tool size may explode if several UTF16-sets needs support

| Memory and disk usage, yes. (keeping related to assemblers/compilers),
| the only real parts may be the tokeniser, parsing routines, and hashing
| algorithm.

The whole source-code would double its size?

| Even limiting the allowed areas of where the full range of unicode
| characters, to say strings and comments, will make a transition a lot
| easier. eg make the restriction that labels must only contain
| 'a..z,A..Z,_,0..9' and numbers only '0..9', directives/operands remain
| as Intel/AMD defined, strings can contain the full unicode set.

IIRC, one of the RosAsm guys tried to add Chinese pattern support
onto the RosAsm-source. Rene may know more about it.

| Would doing this make a great difference to the actual internals of any
| assembler or compiler?

May not be too many work to implement it, but I'm afraid it will need
many good arguments to convince assembler authors to go for a change.
Especially as compiling speed (a competitive factor these days)
will be affected ;)

| > *loss on source-portability and general readability
| Unicode support:
| MacOS - yes
| Linux and most modern UNIX - yes (UTF-8), even GNU Emacs supports
| UTF-8.
| Windows - yes
| Even notepad.exe in Windows XP supports unicode! (both UTF-8 and
| UTF-16)
| > *Net/NG-bandwidth
| > (my news-reader use 'Courier New, text-only', so I'd see only garbage)

| I'll give you that one.

Ok :)
But I mean the readabilty from existing tools, not all tools use
OS-features (perhaps seen as bloated overhead) in their editors.

| > But I think English is the proper language for technicians and
| > programmers. Without a global communication standard we had to
| > rely on Babel-fish, and its name include 'Babylonian confusion' ;)
|
| :D. I can definately see the point on the last one!

Either way, I think if one assembler will start with UTF-support
all others will be forced to follow.

Even the use of UTF for programming tools seems not to be required,
I think about to change from 'my personal' ASCII(>7Fh)-set to a few
common readable UTF-sets (Math-symbols/Greek/Logic/Bool).
But I may also decide to just distribute my current character set.
__
wolfgang


.

Relevant Pages

  • Enhanced Unicode support for "Go" tools
    ... If you are interested in Windows programming in assembler, ... various enhancements to GoAsm and GoLink. ... This means you can now use a Unicode command line; ... GoLink works with a Unicode command line, command files and output and can ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: Enhanced Unicode support for "Go" tools
    ... I really dont get why an assembler need to bother with unicode at all. ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: Video Mode 13h in windows XP ... impossible?
    ... there is NO problem using mode 13h under XP...if you write a DOS ... terminates so does the "DOS box" and you return to the Windows desktop ... A dedicated assembler (most of which are completely free and available ... NASM, this is _certainty_ that it's okay for you to do so...the people ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: Segmentation in real mode
    ... Except that Windows does have its "prohibition" on "direct hardware ... what you're saying about 32-bit programming is still ... Linux is often ignored in this context but it's actually arguably the best ... a "portable assembler", so, you know, it's not really got anything ...
    (alt.lang.asm)
  • Re: Font for a menu?
    ... It wouldn't be so bad if the Windows key were somewhere else on the keyboard, ... That's the one - the main problem is that Microsoft don't distribute a font ... I think the Unicode set has been ... flags exist in the set - but only flags for upward stems. ...
    (microsoft.public.vc.mfc)