@boomzilla said:
@MiffTheFox said:So unicode support is TRWTF now? Next you'll be telling me that you can't set the code page of an application.
Can you explain why you would say this in the context of this tread, because AFAICT, TDEMSYR.
In an age where Unicode has existed for over two decades, it should be commonplace by now. Indeed, many popular programming languages, such as C#, Java, and now C++ (as mentioned above) support it. The OP of this thread is complaining that the Clang compiler supports the use of Unicode in the program itself, instead of forcing the user to use ASCII.
My first sentence is a question, asking nobody in particular if supporting Unicode characters should be considered, as they say here, a "WTF". However, the way it is phrased implies that I don't believe Unicode support. "TRWTF" refers to the core issue of the WTF (although often it's something completely tangential to the OP's intent), and it seems that there is no component to the WTF, as the OP posted it, other then the support of Unicode in Clang.
My sentence sentence is what is known as irony. Code pages are an obsolete technology that predates widespread Unicode support. Each application would run in it's own "code page", a set of mappings for the characters represented by 0x80 to 0xFE. Each code page had a numerical code. For example, in code page 437, 0xEA was the Greek letter Omega, whereas in 819, it was a lowercase letter e with circumflex. Code pages were problematic in computing as misinterpreting a file as the wrong code page lead to a problem known as Mojibake, where characters in a foriegn language became a garbled sequence of characters in the user's own language. Code page support has many problems that Unicode solves, and clearly should not be used in any new application except in the decoding of text files from a legacy system.
The whole point of my post was to point out that the OP apparently considers Unicode to be a WTF, and ironically suggest concern that the code page system is being (was) deprecated. Next time, I'll just make my posts straightforward without any rhetorical questions or irony. (The previous sentence was a lie for the purpose of irony.)