[Cuis-dev] Thoughts about symbols

[Juan Vuletich]

On 11/29/2024 7:22 PM, Andres Valloud via Cuis-dev wrote:
> Why is "sequence of characters" related to whether said sequence is 
> "Unicode"?  What does "Unicode" mean: characters, or code points? 
> Suppose you only care about image representation.  Do you need a "byte 
> string" class and a "small integer string" class for the sake of 
> efficiency?  Or is that an issue of encoding that should only be 
> visible externally?  And what do those "strings" store, characters or 
> code points?  Should the image support denormalized Unicode code point 
> sequences, or should it prioritize efficient at:put:?  Who handles 
> string encoding, and when?
>
> On 11/29/24 5:14 AM, Luciano Notarfrancesco via Cuis-dev wrote:
>>
>> Yes, that’s true, the current design is not wrong. There’s a bit of 
>> code duplication, and that led to me think about unifying and 
>> generalizing it, and I wanted to know your thoughts. I guess the 
>> alternative design would make more sense if the code was triplicated 
>> (if there were 3 kinds of symbols), but I don’t see that coming. A 
>> third alternative would be to move some methods to CharacterSequence, 
>> but I’m not convinced that’s better either.
>

Please take a look at 
https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev/tree/master/Documentation/Presentations/2022-11-UnicodeSupportInCuisSmalltalk 
. Two things that have changed since that paper is that now there is a 
single immediate Unicode-wide Character class, and UnicodeStrings now 
support #at:put:. Class Character and classes in the CharacterSequence 
hierarchy have meaningful class comments that may help.

I believe that, and maybe playing a bin in a Workspace, could give 
better answers to most questions here than email.

If you still have doubts, feel free to ask.

Thanks,

-- 
Juan Vuletich
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