At 19:59 09/02/19, Michael Selig wrote:

>Also there are reports reading the data which expect the data to be 40  
>characters wide. If it wasn't 40 chars, the formatting of the report may  
>screw up.

Hello Michael,

In general, I agree that being able to work with character numbers
is desirable. The implementation isn't exactly easy, but I hope
eventually we will get there. My current guess is that this might
mean that we have to move IO and related stuff a bit more towards
a model with classes stacked on top of each other. But that's just
a guess.

But regarding your point of format screwup, measuring things in
characters won't help. Assuming that each character has the same
width just doesn't carry very far if you look at all the scripts
around the world.

Regards,     Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst / it.aoyama.ac.jp