
Getting Started with V Programming
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Before we study working with runes in V, we will see why you might need to use the rune type. In UTF-16 encoding, code points lower than 216 are encoded using a 16-bit code unit, which is equal to the numerical value of code point. The newer code points greater than or equal to 216 are encoded by compound values of two 16-bit code units. For example, the Cyrillic lowercase á is a combination of U+0430
and U+0301
. Such values are not used as characters in UTF-16 and there is no way to code them as individual code points. To overcome this limitation, we have the rune type in V. Using the rune type, we can represent compound code points as a single integer value that can range between 0
and 4294967295
, as specified in Table 4.3 for u32
. So, with rune, it can be any u32
value, including surrogate code points and values that are not legal in Unicode code points.
Briefly put, character literals have a specific data type called a rune. A rune represents a Unicode...