[Lazarus] RE : RE : RE : LCL and custom keyboard layouts

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Ludo Brands wrote:
>> Although setxkbmap assumes that somebody with admin rights has set up 
>> the appropriate files: I'm fairly certain that there's not a standard 
>> one for APL (which is, at best, a minority interest). You can 
>> do a bit 
>> with xmodmap, but things rapidly start getting messy: X has 
>> been rather 
>> halfhearted in its embrace of Unicode.
>>
> 
> These guys did it :
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2011-March/1267379.html. Cut
> and paste ;)

Except that that's /not/ Unicode at the application level, it's 8-bit 
KAPL encoding. This whole area is somewhat messy, since most APL 
implementations- not to mention the software that they execute- go back 
to the days of Selectrics and EBCDIC card punches. Apart from the things 
I've been tinkering with over the last few weeks the only other 
implementation that I know is based on UTF-8 is Paraplegic 
http://code.google.com/p/paraplegic/, the rest are mired in backwards 
compatibility issues.

You probably didn't notice that a few weeks ago I asked whether FPC 
could handle things like ⍴ as a function name. At the time I was 
wondering whether APL's functionality could be supplied as Pascal 
functions, I've got various numeric analysis jobs where a fusion of APL 
and a grid containing the result of a database query could be very useful.

I've found a couple of possible issues relating to Unicode handling in 
(Sorokin's) TRegExpr and in TStringList, I'll try to get them reported 
with test code over the next few days now that I've got the bulk of the 
parser/evaluator out of the way, and before I start on the Lazarus app 
with probable refactoring.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

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