On Sun, Aug 13, 2017 at 10:17 PM, Jack Woehr
<jwoehr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Go Language: w/rt/ Pike, strings, runes, byte slices, see also
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/golang-nuts/84GCvDBhpbg
Jack, I'm not sure what you are trying to illustrate with that thread.
I said that the one thing I might appreciate about strings in Go (if
true) is that the language discourages conflating bytes and
characters.
The thread you linked to is making me believe that Go actually makes
it quite easy to conflate them, and moreover makes it easy to conflate
integers and Unicode "platonic ideal characters".
Maybe we are not on the same page regarding the meaning of "conflate".
What I mean when I say it is easy to conflate two things is that it is
very easy to mistake one thing for the other; or for the distinction
between the two things to be quite blurry. It's pretty well
established that in the pre-Unicode world, it was basically accepted
that the distinction between bytes, (small) integers, and characters
should be very, very hazy. At least if you wanted to get any real work
done on a computer. Because computers were short on resources and
programmers loved to be macho and clever.
What you've shown me and what I've read so far seems to indicate that
Go is merely doing what C does, except updating from ASCII to UTF-8.
Which means in some ways it's even more confusing than C, and
perpetuating common misunderstandings about Unicode and character
encodings.
John Y.
midrange.com
