Re: Re: ≠ or not equal

[Richard Gaskin]

-hh wrote:

 >> R.G. wrote
 >> If we were to look for not-equal-to operators that affect large
 >> numbers of people, it might be worth considering supporting "!=",
 >> since a majority of other languages support so for today's audience
 >> (and more importantly tomorrow's) that habit impacts orders of
 >> magnitude more developers than an old HyperCard-specific token.
 >
 > This is certainly NOT a problem that is specially linked to HyperCard.
 > We have it always when importing any 8-bit data from earlier Macs.
 >
 > This is more generally a problem of *Encoding*. The specials of the
 > extended Macintosh codeTable (here: char 173) and the differences
 > to Latin-1 (or HTML entities, where ­ is ­ the optional
 > hyphen) etc.

For data you're absolutely right, which is why the team spent so much 
time implementing Unicode.

But in this thread Terence's concern was more specific.  It wasn't about 
merely displaying "≠" as data.  The issue here is about the semantics of 
that character when it appears in scripts.

When used as data, such as in a quoted string, "≠" was no better or 
worse than anything else not found in Latin ISO 8859-1, formerly the 
engine's native character set.

With v7 and later the problem with displaying "≠" as data has been 
solved.  The only remaining issue is whether is should be supported 
across platforms as an evaluation operator.

Personally, I don't care one way or another; I was just noting that we 
have a long list of things to do and this one seems pretty low in the 
priority queue given how few people it affects.


 > "!=" is a good solution (as it is one out of the ASCCI 7-bit range).

Agreed.  I was very impressed Mark Wieder implemented that as quickly as 
he did - thanks Mark!

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com