Re: UTF-8 and Alt key in the console

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

David Newall wrote:
> Jan Engelhardt wrote:
>> What do you mean by self-terminating? There is no easy
>> synchronization like in UTF-8, given you are anywhere inside
>> a text stream, how do you know (a) you are already in an
>> escape sequence and (b) how to figure out the rebegin of
>> normal text.
> 
> It's not very useful being able to tell you are inside a escape sequence
> unless you see that sequence from the start.  You do need the complete
> sequence to make sense of it.

I think what Jan is alluding to is the property of UTF-8 text that you 
can start in the middle of a string and either skip an incomplete 
character or find the beginning of it.  If you can search backwards, you 
can find the beginning of an escape sequence, too; the "skip incomplete" 
  functionality is missing, though, but as you say, isn't actually all 
that useful in real life *for the applications which use these kinds of 
escape sequences.*

	-hpa