3 ms·

> I'm basing this all on the idea that it's almost always a mistake to confuse how a program manages some data, vs how a drawing lib might. Your language should

> I'm basing this all on the idea that it's almost always a mistake to confuse how a program manages some data, vs how a drawing lib might. Your language shouldn't concern it self with how many glyphs it needs to draw... until you actually try to draw them. Well, why not? There are a lot of things that people would want to call string.length for — drawing little equals signs under text in a terminal, for a frivolous example — where that’s the whole reason they’re making the call. Off the top of my head I’m not really sure how you solve that with variable-width characters if there’s no way to separate out or count them.

coldtea 3y ago
>Well, why not? Separation of concerns?
- emodendroket 3y ago
  I’m not sure what separation of concerns is served by not providing a method to show how many glyphs are in a given string.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Who said there shouldn't be one? The point is there should be more than one, and that not all are a language/string library-level concern. The context is "I guess I'm basing this all on the idea that it's almost always a mistake to confuse how a program manages some data, vs how a drawing lib might. Your language shouldn't concern it self with how many glyphs it needs to draw... until you actually try to draw them." This means that shouldn't be some generic "length" method, but appropriate separate-concerns methods (plural), some of which (e.g. regarding character width in pixels when rendered) even belong to a drawing lib and not the language at all. The parent's point is that length (bytes), characters (count), and glyphs (size, shape) are different concerns. The latter would concern a drawing lib or a renderer, but not be a core string method (which should concern itself with the abstract notion of characters and the concrete notion of bytes).

coldtea 3y ago

>Well, why not? Separation of concerns?

emodendroket 3y ago
I’m not sure what separation of concerns is served by not providing a method to show how many glyphs are in a given string.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Who said there shouldn't be one? The point is there should be more than one, and that not all are a language/string library-level concern. The context is "I guess I'm basing this all on the idea that it's almost always a mistake to confuse how a program manages some data, vs how a drawing lib might. Your language shouldn't concern it self with how many glyphs it needs to draw... until you actually try to draw them." This means that shouldn't be some generic "length" method, but appropriate separate-concerns methods (plural), some of which (e.g. regarding character width in pixels when rendered) even belong to a drawing lib and not the language at all. The parent's point is that length (bytes), characters (count), and glyphs (size, shape) are different concerns. The latter would concern a drawing lib or a renderer, but not be a core string method (which should concern itself with the abstract notion of characters and the concrete notion of bytes).