add unicode/utf8 support from an pullrequest in dan200/computercraft

[ghost]

dan200/ComputerCraft#532

[Lemmmy]

I'm concerned about how this would interact with #409 - we're essentially doubling down on being single-byte, fantasy console style.

[SquidDev]

While unicode terminal support would be fantastic, at this point I can't see an obvious way to do it without either duplicating an awful lot of functionality or introducing breaking changes.

If someone can some up with a reasonable design for how to approach this, it might be worth looking into, but as it stands it's not really sane.

[neumond]

Unicode support imposes lots of problems since many characters are wide (emoji, japanese, chinese symbols) and must take 2 character places. This makes it especially problematic if one sets cursor position in the middle of such character and writes something. OpenComputers terminal code has lots of quirks with these wide characters.

[Lemmmy]

I agree. Part of the beauty of CC is the simplicity. While it's not as simple as, say, a run of the mill fantasy console, it's still very easy to work with and to understand (by design!), and bringing the endless quirks of Unicode is going to cause problems even for jedi

The update that introduced the new terminal font (with the teletext characters, etc.) introduced a variety of accents that greatly increased the potential language span of CC. But, it isn't, and never was, CC's responsibility to provide complete support for the diverse world of languages. This ties in to #474 quite interestingly - that issue can only introduce so many translations without Unicode support, but in my opinion, that's fine