Re: [MacPerl] IDEA: Cool (IMO) addition to MacPerl

[Dave Schmitt <dschmi1@umbc.edu>]

On Fri, 17 Jul 1998, Chris Nandor wrote:

> As quoting characters, brackets nest.  q{}, qq[], qw(), etc.  I think it
> would be cool for MacPerl to support others; maybe [characters removed]

I read my mail using pine running on an IRIX system which I telnet to from
another machine (in this case, a Macintosh). My telnet client is configured
to use ISO8859-1 translation which is about as close to a standard as I can
get, and these characters come up garbled to me; mostly as upper case
letters w/ various accents. 

I assume that these are smart quotes, the wacky double-angle-bracket things
that AppleScript uses, and maybe something else--characters which are used
to great success on a Mac, but are treated very differently on Wintel and
Un*x boxes with different internal character sets. I agree that such pairs
would be cool to support, but, as they lie outside the traditional ASCII
character set, their use decreases the portability of scripts, which is a
very bad thing IMHO. If MacPerl does support them, at the very least some
clear warning of the portability problem they introduce should be provided. 

Dave Schmitt <dschmi1@umbc.edu>



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