Irie Tools (Business & Technology)

Quick update: Irie Pascal 3.0 will support Unicode!

So what is Unicode anyway? Well, here is a paragraph from the Unicode home page that can serve as a short definition.

The Unicode Standard is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages.

You will probably agree that being able to “interchange, process, and display written text from diverse languages”, sounds like a good thing, but you probably don’t want to have to worry to much about the details. So the plan is for Irie Pascal 3.0 to follow the example of other programming languages like Java and C#, and use Unicode internally for all strings and convert as necessary when reading strings in or writing strings out.

The Benefits

The benefits of supporting Unicode are:

• Easy processing of XML and other text on the web.
• Programs can be written in any language (you will be able to use any language for variable names, comments, etc).

Learning about Unicode

I spent the last few days at the Unicode home page (the official source of information about the Unicode standard) learning about Unicode. What did I learn? Well, Unicode is complex, and the Unicode standard was not written to be easy to read or understand. I did learn enough to know that supporting Unicode is going to be both interesting and challenging.

I Ordered a book (about Unicode) from Amazon

I ordered this book, Unicode Demystified: A Practical Programmer’s Guide to the Encoding Standard, from Amazon. It looks good, hopefully it will be helpful.

The recent takeover attempt by Microsoft seems to have really scared the living daylights out of Yahoo, they are introducing new products as fast as they can.

Yahoo just introduced BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) which, as the name suggests, allows you to build a customized search product on top of the Yahoo search platform. Check out this TechCrunch article, Yahoo Radically Opens Web Search With BOSS, for more information.