[Openmcl-devel] how many angels can dance on a unicode character?

[Gary Byers]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007, Takehiko Abe wrote:

> Gary Byers wrote:
>
>> No; I spent most of yesterday writing replies to these messages.
>> I need to learn to write more quickly.
>
> Thanks you. I hope this is not exactly like discussing about angels
> for you.
>

It's getting that way, to be honest.  I started to write a longer
more detailed reply, but started to see myself trying to make points
in ways that I've already tried.

If two people look at something and one says "this is good, almost
self-evidently so" and the other says "no, it's bad, almost
self-evidently so" and a few attempts at persuasion fail, it's not
clear that the same attempts to make the same points would work
if they were tried again.  I have the sense that my arguments are
convincing you that you're right and that your arguments are having
the same effect on me, and I don't think that it'd be productive
to spend time repeating repeating the same arguments.

It might make sense to re-read each others' email in a few days,
and one or both of us might see points that we've missed so far.
It might also be the case that we just have fundamentally different
opinions about what is "good" and "important", and that these
opinions took a long time to form and would take a long time to
change.

I would say that if the "end result" (whatever that is) is that I'm
still not convinced that using UTF-16 internally is a good idea but
that other people are, I'd be glad to offer some support for anyone
who wants to implement this on a branch so that it can be concretely
evaluated.  It is non-trivial to make such a change, but it's clearly
possible, and (aside from things like SVN/CVS) I'd be glad to answer
questions about how affected things work and suggest strategies for
dealing with pragmatic/boostrapping issues.

I don't want to sound closed-minded about this, but I don't want to
keep saying the same things over and over again, either.