"David Brown" <david.brown@hesbynett.removethisbit.no> wrote in message news:z_edndPQTNi6ox7UnZ2dnUVZ8vKdnZ2d@lyse.net...> I'm beginning to get a vague idea of what you are talking about. When you > gave the domain name, I was able to guess that the character your > newsreader fails to post in "?Text" is a phi, and googling for "phitext" > gave me this: > > <http://lists.planix.com/pipermail/lout-users/1995q4/000297.html>That's from David. He is a programming tools guy who wrote a C compiler that uses PhiText in a manor like I talked about in earlier posts. It accepts ASCII files and senses when the extended character set is present. The same will apply to PhiText 2.0 which will come next.> It also gave some hits for source code, such as this: > > <http://read.pudn.com/downloads62/sourcecode/compiler/215357/compiler/PHITEXT.C__.htm>Yes. I wrote that.> As far as I can see, back in 1988 you were interested in producing a > general but efficient way to encode a wider range of characters than > ASCII. You had slightly different priorities than the Unicode folks, who > were starting at the same sort of time. In particular, you have far fewer > possible characters (using 11 bits for a total of 1536), but unlike > Unicode you use another 21 bits to store visual information such as text > styles, weights, fonts, and colour. > > To support this system, you have been working on a text editor, a > compiler, and an embedded operating system. You are now working with > conversion tools so that a programmer could store their source code in > Unicode, and translate it into phiText for your compiler. > > Am I right so far?Yes. I was impressed that you were slanted toward UTF-8 and discouraged me from supporting UTF-16 or UTF-32 (presumably as a file format). You are familiar with the byte-endian problem with stored data and UTF-8 is the only variant that handles this problem well. Now you can see that PhiText implemented this same idea 21 years ago and 15 years before UTF-8 became what it is today.> How much of this software is actually developed? How many people are > involved in creating it? How many users do you have? Has it actually > been used in real systems?The editor is in its 5th in-use generation. However, none of the compiler generations became complete. The parser only parses the code and prints compilation listings and symbol tables, data types etc. There is no code generation yet. Because I am now switching to full Unicode, it will mean I will have to rewrite a lot of library code and start over on all of the tools. I am hoping that I can get a working editor by summer and start working on the next generation compiler. It will soon create a www.phisystem.net website and that will keep people posted as to my progress. I have been doing exactly like you have suggested and the new flat character format is 32-bits in size. It will include the entire Unicode Code Point set and still have room to add significant character properties for eye appealing source code in the new language. It is working out very well. Thank you for your suggestion. I will let you know when I have significant progress. Take care... Paul
Attention: European C/C++/C#/Java Programmers-Call for Input
Started by ●January 27, 2009
Reply by ●February 2, 20092009-02-02
Reply by ●February 3, 20092009-02-03
Paul K. McKneely wrote:> My frustration > has been that people want to know the details about what > the products are going to be like and when I give them some > details then others come by and read it and start to think the > products are ready for sale. I would rather just ask narrow > well-focused questions but responders get very impatient > because they want to know everything about it and it is not > ready to be revealed to the world. The PhiSystem.net website > is not even in operation yet but David Brown wanted to know > what my future plans were so I told him. Right now, they are > just plans and plans take time to implement.Thanks for the clarification. I don't want to rush you, my projects takes ages, too, if it is not a client project :-) But in my experience it helps to discuss ideas early. Imagine you're developing a full product for some years, but in the end noboby needs it. -- Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Reply by ●February 5, 20092009-02-05
