Re: [q-lang-users] More Unicode queries.

[Albert G. <Dr....@t-...>]

Rob Hubbard wrote:
> I think the user should be able to define his own, but I'm not sure
> how this should be expressed. Then if a user particularly needs a
> character outside that set, he can define his own.

I don't think that this should be part of the language. Q doesn't want
to be XML after all. Q strings are constants; there's no direct way to
rewrite strings, as you suggested as a mechanism to add your own entity
definitions. The escape mechanism just provides an alternative way to
specify certain character literals, and I think it should be kept that
way. If you really need more then you're always free to write your own Q
module which provides the necessary operations to perform any kind of
string substitutions that you want (albeit at runtime).

I agree, however, that it's useful to have symbolic escapes for a fixed
set of special characters such as extended Latin, math symbols, arrows,
block graphics and the like. The W3C set has some 2200 of these, which
AFAICS provides you with plenty of special symbols for almost any
purpose. The downside is that the W3C set doesn't include most foreign
scripts, but why would anyone want to write, say, Kanji using escape
sequences? It's much easier to type these directly using the appropriate
input methods and a Unicode-capable text editor.

D'accord?

Albert

-- 
Dr. Albert Gr"af
Dept. of Music-Informatics, University of Mainz, Germany
Email:  Dr....@t-..., ag...@mu...
WWW:    http://www.musikinformatik.uni-mainz.de/ag