EEL Changes for Unicode Support in Epsilon 12

In EEL, the char type is now 16 bits wide. The new byte type is 8 bits wide.

Key codes that represent keys the user can type are now 32 bits, not 16. There are far more possible key codes than the 707 in the last version. The NUMKEYS macro, which indicated the maximum number of keys, has been removed. EEL code that loops on it must be rewritten to use new primitives that operate on key ranges; in that context, the new MAXKEYS macro, which holds a value higher than the biggest possible key code, may be useful. See the next section for details on converting old EEL code.

All key codes now contain individual bits KEY_SHIFT, KEY_CTRL and KEY_ALT. The KEY_PLAIN( ) macro strips them.

EEL source files may include 16-bit Unicode characters in two ways. First, there are several new escape sequences to represent Unicode characters in string or character constants, such as \u0391, \u{391}, and \u[Greek Capital Letter Alpha], which all represent the same character.

You can also save an EEL source file in UTF-8 encoding, and use literal Unicode characters in your source file. In this case your file must begin with a UTF-8 byte order mark signature. For compatibility with existing EEL files, Epsilon does not interpret UTF-8 sequences in files without a byte order mark.

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More Customization Options in Epsilon 12 Changes from Older Versions Converting Old EEL Code