
Smjörið er brætt og hveitið smátt og smátt hrært út í það, þangað til það er gengið upp í smjörið. - pg
Thanks to a fix by Patrick Collison, utf-8 now seems to work right.
======
far33d
So. A note to all the "unicode makes this unusable" people -

Apparently, while you were complaining, someone else was solving.

~~~
henning
OK. Now how about database access (with support for prepared statements),
regular expressions, and networking?

~~~
benmathes
<http://paulgraham.com/core.html>

~~~
henning
Super-duper. I'm not going to use Arc for anything serious until essential
libraries are in place.

~~~
pg
Different people have different ideas of serious. To me, exploratory
programming is fairly serious, because that's the kind of programming that
generates ideas.

Arc is already capable of supporting some subset of applications that are
serious in your sense. News.YC is at least moderately serious in that sense.

~~~
henning
You said News.YC uses some kind of persistent hash structure for storing
everything. This seems to me like Greenspun's Tenth Law except with Berkeley
DB instead of Common Lisp; I wouldn't want to write the logic to do what BDB
already does much better and faster (I don't want to implement ACID
transactions myself if I decide I need them).

~~~
niels_olson
news.arc stores all information in flat files as lists.

------
gojomo
♫♪♫ to my ears. I ♥ unicode! To ∞ and beyond, ☺

~~~
tocomment
How do I make the infinity? Actually where do I get all those symbols?

~~~
erydo
You have to buy a unicode keyboard. They have over 95000 keys and take up
about nine square meters. Hope you have a big desk.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

~~~
pg
You know, that would actually be an amusing hardware-hacking project.

If you made a keyboard that had every character in every language spoken in
the EU, you could even file to make it a standard with whatever earnest
standards body is in charge of such things. No linguistic minority should have
to use control keys! It would be like giving peanut butter to a dog.

~~~
ivankirigin
A smart bureaucrat might mandate dynamically rewritable keys and get the
Optimus <http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/>

But smart people don't endeavor to regulate minutia.

~~~
Xichekolas
_But smart people don't endeavor to regulate minutia._

I think you just implied that all politicians are dumb. I agree.

------
prescod
Do I understand correctly that Arc strings are sequences of octets?

If so: I really don't want to be a negativity guy but it seems like every
language that has made an 8-bit string the default string type has regretted
it later because it is so painful to change it without breaking code. Okay,
Paul says that he won't mind breaking code. Maybe he means it, but it doesn't
make any sense to me to knowingly and consciously repeat a design mistake that
dozens of other people have made and regretted.

It really just takes one day to get this right. You need to distinguish
between the raw bytes read from a device and the true string type (which needs
to be 21 bit or greater). You need a trivial converter from one to the other
(which you can presumably steal from MZScheme) and back.

That's it. You get this right at the beginning and you never have to backtrack
or break code.

My apologies in advance if this post is based on incorrect premises. I'm
trying to help.

~~~
olavk
Arc snarfs the string implementation from MzScheme which support Unicode in
The Right Way, as code points rather than octets.

~~~
prescod
So should I infer that the only reason UTF-8 is mentioned is that the reader
APIs do not let you select the codec? Or is even that provided in which case
it is accurate to say that Arc supports Unicode-in-general?

~~~
olavk
Arc uses MzSchemes reader (it modifies the readtable slightly to support
[]-syntax). AFAIK you cannot access the reader API from inside Arc. The reason
Utf-8 is mentioned is that it is the default encoding when MzScheme reads or
writes files or streams.

I don't think anyone at this point would claim that Arc supports unicode-in-
general.

------
nickb
.(; sɹǝpuoʍ sǝop ǝɹnssǝɹd ɔı1qnd ɟo ʇıq ǝ1ʇʇı1 ɐ 'ǝǝs ¡ʍou ǝɯosǝʍɐ sı ɔɹɐ uı
ʇɹoddns ǝpoɔıun ¡ɥɐɥ

~~~
dcurtis
Yes, because writing upside down is so incredibly useful! How did we ever live
without it?

/sarcasm

------
mdemare
Nâh, dâh zèn we maui klâh mei...

    
    
        (define Y
          (λ (m)
            ((λ (f) (m (λ (a) ((f f) a))))
             (λ (f) (m (λ (a) ((f f) a)))))))

~~~
Zak
Great... but that's Scheme, not Arc.

------
olifante
Wikipedia to the rescue: "The butter is melted and the flour stirred into it
(slowly but surely), until it is has blended with the butter."
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:S.Örvarr.S>)

~~~
timr
It's an icelandic recipe for roux?

------
pchristensen
What language is that? I'm guessing Icelandic; it's a little too unicodey to
be Danish or Norwegian, but the words look similar.

~~~
pg
Good guess.

~~~
vidar
As an Icelander, I must surely ask what pushed you to use Icelandic as an
example. :)

~~~
queensnake
Does Icelandic have the 'th' sound? I've heard that English is the only
European language with it, but if Icelandic has the written thorn, maybe you
have that sound too?

~~~
mathrick
It does, that's precisely what þ and ð represent (the unvoiced and voiced
variants respectively, which got folded into the same "th" in English). Also,
þorn is the best letter name ever :)

------
jamiequint
农历新年 Happy (Chinese) New Year!

~~~
dmoney
I'll never understand why asians type all in question marks. It must be some
kind of unary system.

------
TMCMan
If you are wondering: On Linux/X11, there's Ctrl+Shift+[unicde number in
hexadecimal], gnome-character-map, umap or KCharMap (ت)

And now for the less serious part:

ሞሡሢ Am I the only one whom these Ethiopic characters remind of Tengwar? BTW,
are there Unicode chars for Tengwar? I think there should be! (But not for
Klingon, because it sucks.) I have fun wirting this on my ⌨, but ℐ∫ ᚾℍℹ⑀ not
pointless? Who cares? Anyway, now we can use distinct characters for Roman
numerals: Ⅰ,Ⅱ,Ⅲ,Ⅳ,Ⅴ,Ⅵ,Ⅶ,Ⅷ,Ⅹ,Ⅻ,Ⅽ,Ⅿ! Ye darn kids! Everythin we had was 7-bit
ASCII, without parity, and we were damn greatful for it? You think you had it
bad? I had to use Morse code for browsing porn, back in my days! And I had to
etch my public key into the wall of a rotten ol' cave! We did not have this
fancy-shmancy routed network, i had to remember the way from here to there all
by myself!

\--- this post was presented to you by Too Much Coffee.

------
r7000
Freude, schöner Götterfunken! Tochter aus Elysium!

------
mixmax
if you search for "Smjörið er brætt og hveitið smátt og smátt hrært út í það,
þangað til það er gengið upp í smjörið." on Google this thread is the fourth
result.

Damn fast...

------
rams
இது தமிழ

~~~
jey
Tamil++; // (இது C)

------
nreece
किसी वस्तु, व्यक्ति, स्थान, या भावना का नाम बताने वाले शब्द को संज्ञा कहते
हैं। जैसे - गोविन्द, हिमालय, वाराणसी, त्याग आदि संज्ञा में तीन शब्द-रूप हो
सकते हैं -- प्रत्यक्ष रूप, अप्रत्यक्ष रूप और संबोधन रूप ।

------
kmt
Браво!

~~~
ph0rque
В самом деле браво!

~~~
mojuba
Чему вы рады? :)

~~~
ph0rque
Да просто...

~~~
treeform
Делать нечево...

~~~
ph0rque
Мы все-таки на этом веб-сайте находимся, а не работаем... :~)

------
kajecounterhack
Happy chinese new year. 白人看不懂

~~~
tel
这个白人看得懂。

------
dzorz
И цан’т белиеве ит!

~~~
piranha
И тоо!

------
olavk
Røv og nøgler! PG succumbs to the demands of political correctness! Will we
soon see mandatory static type declarations and CSS in Arc?

~~~
pg
Well, not quite. I gave Patrick an early version of the code, a couple weeks
before Arc was released, and he immediately sent me this fix. I just didn't
get around to incorporating it till now.

There's a difference between things I don't care about, and things I'm
actively against. I don't care about character sets and css, so those things
will no doubt gradually get better.

Classic static typing, however, I think is actually a bad idea in a general-
purpose language. It makes languages weaker. So it's never likely to happen in
Arc itself. However, one of the explicit goals of Arc is to be a good language
for writing other languages on top of, and I can imagine plenty of languages
for specific types of problems (e.g. circuit design) in which static typing
would be a good idea.

~~~
jgrahamc
I don't understand why CSS or HTML are being mentioned during the design of
Arc. These seem like library issues and your announcement of Arc was spoiled
IMHO by the "rant" about HTML and tables. This is only made worse by the Arc
Challenge which seems to be more about the design of libraries for HTML/HTTP
etc. than the language.

What am I missing?

~~~
pg
I could tell from all the people already dissing Arc before it was released
that whatever I released was going to be attacked on any possible pretense.
So, like someone bracing himself to be hit, that was what I was thinking about
as I was about to release it: what are people going to seize upon as a way of
attacking it? Which meant that was what much of the initial announcement ended
up being about.

It was a pretty odd situation to be in. If I'd been releasing Arc into a
neutral environment, I probably would have said what I wrote in
<http://paulgraham.com/core.html>. But maybe it's just as well I gave all the
flames something to expend themselves on before talking about subtler
questions.

~~~
LaurieCheers
I thought you handled it pretty well. Basically, you wrote a big sign saying
"here is the bike shed", to make sure bike-shed commenters had something to
occupy them. :)

------
Create
Öt szép szűzlány őrült írót nyúz. Egy hűtlen vejét fülöncsípő, dühös mexikói
úr Wesselényinél mázol Quitóban.

------
patrickg-zill
Bork bork bork!

------
bootload
Η ευχαρίστηση στην εργασία βάζει την τελειότητα στην εργασία ~ kudos to
'Patrick Collison'

~~~
eusman
Έλληνας;!

~~~
bootload
Indeed. Aristotle in fact ... translates roughly as "... Pleasure in the job
puts perfection in the work ..."

------
jey
What needed to be changed? I am no character encoding guru but I thought that
treating strings as opaque octet sequences was good enough to "support" UTF-8.
i.e. Unless you actively break it, it should work by default.

~~~
olavk
See this thread: <http://arclanguage.com/item?id=1563>

------
olifante
普通话

~~~
btw0
湖北话

~~~
goncha
上海话

~~~
trevelyan
我还是喜欢英文。

------
rokhayakebe
geeks. you guys forget about us sometimes. what is this?

~~~
paulgb
Hacker News now supports "utf-8", a way of storing text that supports
characters from languages other than English.

The excitement comes from the fact that Hacker News is programmed in Arc, and
the change to Hacker News implies that Arc will soon support utf-8 too.

~~~
rokhayakebe
thank you sir

------
nirs
נחמד.

------
leoc
£!

~~~
ph0rque
€!!!

~~~
benmathes
۩۞۩۞

------
joe24pack
To je výborný !

~~~
stener
Zdravím do Čech :)

~~~
joe24pack
Byl jsem narozeny cech, spravne prazak, ale ted jsem american. Prominte, muj
pocitac nema hacky a carky, a moje cesina je detska.

------
rob
åwesøme!

------
staunch
日本

~~~
shiro
testing some pitfalls... U+005c \ U+FF3C ＼ U+FFE5 ￥

U+007E ~ U+301C 〜 U+FF5E ～

------
tsuru
ｐｇの自分で書いた本は日本語に翻訳されているし、これからアークも日本で広げるかなぁ。日本ではリスプを使ってる人はまだいるかなぁ。

------
axod
heh fantastic. I take back all that I said. Nice one ☺

------
morbidkk
someone from India --> संगणक प्रणाली - आर्क

------
ipeev
Хубаво. Фонта само е някакъв преебан.

------
euccastro
það er gaman að lesa. Takk fyrir!

------
arundelo
Bona novaĵo!

------
hhm
Buenísimo!

------
jalammar
يعيش اليونيكود, شكراً بول.

------
btbytes
ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ. ಸವಿನುಡಿ ಕನ್ನಡ :)

~~~
btbytes
namaskAra, savinudi kannaDa :)

------
nablaone
łąś żółć - testing

------
duke
unicode and arc are ♫♪♫ to my ears too.. a fun way to play with arc and
unicode might be at <http://twext.cc/go/arc>

------
mojuba
Լիսպը փայլուն է։

------
DanielBMarkham
but ixnay on the igpay atinlay upportsay

------
astrodust
☃

------
_bq
pg, you are my hero.

------
DXL
My name is Daniël. Not sure though if writing that wasn't possible before...

------
n3m6
މީމަގޭ މާދަރީ ބަސް. ދިވެހި ބަހަކީ ރީތިބަހެކެވެ.

This is my language - Dhivehi. Written right to left.

------
sabat
Paul Graham rocks.

~~~
aquarin
ПГ рулз.

