Arc Forumnew | comments | leaders | submitlogin
1 point by are 6085 days ago | link | parent

> Or do you really mean "octet" or byte, of which several are regularly used to represent a single character during a unicode transmission? In such a case.... define "string". Is a "string" a sequence of bytes, or a sequence of characters?

I know I shouldn't have dipped my ignorant toe into Unicode waters :-)

Maybe a better question would be: If Arc got rid of the character datatype by collapsing strings-and-characters into strings-and-substrings, could you leave "how to represent a string" (chars vs. octets vs. bytes vs. code points vs. glyphs) out of the language spec altogether? Or would such a "clean" string abstraction conflict with having Unicode support (since Unicode is deeply encoding-specific)?