GoldSim Technology Group

jtauxe · Joined: 28 May 2008 Posts: 30 Location: Los Alamos, NM

Will GoldSim handle Unicode characters?
Like these: ĉħąяǻčţēŕ

I realize it does not use Strings as variables, but as far as comments, descriptions, etc. it seems to convert some characters that should be available. For example, the character "Č" in the word Čifársky (the name of a small water body in Slovakia) gets converted to "C" in descriptions and other text in GoldSim. The "á" remains as it is, perhaps since it is not Unicode.

What's up?
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my web stuff: http://www.neptuneandco.com/~jtauxe

Neptune and Co.'s GoldSim pages:
http://www.neptuneandco.com/goldsim

rkossik · Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 7:14 am Post subject:

John,

Good question. Most applications are built using ASCII only strings, multi-byte character strings (MBCS) or Unicode strings. It is difficult to mix and match. GoldSim uses MBCS. This assures that the Slovaks can use their local strings, but those specifics get lost when moving the model to a machine with a different local settings (or OS).

Because this is an all or nothing approach, we would have to change our expression parser, tokenizer, colorizer, binary expression tree builder, node builder etc. to change to Unicode. In addition, we would have to add code that prevents usage of non-standard characters as IDs (element names). That’s a big effort for a relatively small improvement. So, yes it is on our list, but it's priority is rather low right now.
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Rick Kossik
GoldSim Technology Group

jtauxe · Joined: 28 May 2008 Posts: 30 Location: Los Alamos, NM

I just noticed that within a Text Box (the formatted, scrollable text element that is useful for on-page documentation) it seems that Unicode is supported. So that's interesting. It also means that at least in some cases, one could use one of these if the formatting is absolutely necessary.
_________________
my web stuff: http://www.neptuneandco.com/~jtauxe

Neptune and Co.'s GoldSim pages:
http://www.neptuneandco.com/goldsim

rkossik · Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 8:28 am Post subject:

Yeah, but that is simply a note (and that is easy). It becomes much more difficult if we need to deal with those characters in element names (that need to be parsed).
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Rick Kossik
GoldSim Technology Group