An inconvenient truth

[Benji Smith]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Unicode characters would be great and quite innovative. My personal 
> choice is the chevrons Foo«Bar» which are easily distinguished visually 
> from ASCII symbols and also easy on the eyes. But I never thought of it 
> as an either-or choice, only as an alternate. I mean, requiring special 
> editor support or typing Alt+171 whenever it comes about templates will 
> do nothing in their favor. So an ASCII-only syntax that's also palatable 
> is a must.

The chevrons would be very cool. Visually, they're my favorite option.

> All editors I tried in both Unix and Windows displayed the chevrons 
> properly (beautifully in fact). Even command-line programs such as less 
> and cat had no problem. Could people try the chevrons with various 
> editors and report their experience here?

I use TextPad on Windows to edit all my D files. It doesn't handle UTF-8 
at all, unfortunately. It'll display the chevrons just fine, but it 
saves them as extended ASCII (byte values: 174 & 175) rather than as 
UTF-8 digraphs. Consequently, DMD rejects the source file.

Hmmmmm. I really ought to switch to a different text editor. Lacking 
good unicode support is really just inexcusable these days.

--benji