[Cuis-dev] Making Cuis Unicode-only and VectorGraphics-only. (was Re: Alternative arrows)

[Douglas Brebner]

On 20/10/2022 01:45, Juan Vuletich wrote:
> On 10/19/2022 7:38 PM, Douglas Brebner via Cuis-dev wrote:
>> On 19/10/2022 20:33, Juan Vuletich via Cuis-dev wrote:
>>
>> I really like the idea of having ligatures and fancy symbols.
>>
>>> And yes, this could open the door to '<=', etc just like Fira Code 
>>> with ligatures. It could behave exactly like that. We'd need to use 
>>> shout for ASCII->Unicode and do the conversion back to ASCII for 
>>> save. Files are plain ASCII, Smalltalk tools look fancy.
>>
>> Just curious, why do files have to stay plain ASCII and not become UTF-8?
> 
> They don't. If an UTF-8 file only uses ASCII characters, it is 
> automatically ASCII. In other words, ASCII is a subset of UTF-8 and any 
> ASCII file is automatically UTF-8.

I do know how UTF-8 works.

> In this case, if we use ':=' for assignment and '^' in files, most code 
> would be pure ASCII. If we use non-ASCII Unicode arrows in code, then 
> the file is no longer ASCII, and this could make it harder to port or 
> share common code with other Smalltalks.

Okf I was just wondering if it was a hard requirement due to technical 
or design reasons or if it was just a don't gratuitously break 
compatibility thing. I see it's the latter, ty.