Re: Universal Metacharacters

Fernando Franco writes:

| Say a dozen (one for each F-key in keyboards).
| + 1 as universal commenter
| + 1 as universal escaper
| + 10 more for the future, unless somebody can think of some more uses
| already
|
| Comments?

Norman Walsh replies:

>In as much as regularity generally makes things simpler and easier to
>learn and remember, it has some appeal, but I fear its completely
impractical.

Thanks, Norman. At least I confirm that at first glance, nothing seems too
wrong.
Regarding the practical side (I should have included some paragraph about
it), I think I know what you mean, but just to be sure...

Just how much would it cost to define a dozen of new, arbitrary characters,
reserved for this sole use, under the control of some authority (say the
TAG)?
Let's imagine the TAG seems some value to the idea, creates the characters,
and sends a letter to whoever mantains unicode (or more organizations if
necessary).
Is that how it would work? If so, sounds simple to me, in principle. Is it
naive?

What could happen then?
Well, the word could be run so that at least new, future languages, are
metacharacters-aware from the very start.
If it sounds logical, and costs just about nothing, I see no reason why
people would not agree.
Wouldn't this be reason enough to do it already, in such case?

If so. would the TAG be interested in suggesting them the inclusion?

And regarding already existent languages...what exactly would full
replacement imply?
Could for instance Zend start including them in new versions of PHP? How
would that work?
What would happen if we considered W3C languages?

Fernando Franco

Received on Tuesday, 22 August 2006 08:26:32 UTC