John McGehee

In this article I show you how to use multilingual UTF-8 strings with standard, unmodified OpenAccess oa-22.04p028 release. In the last  article , I introduced UTF-8, the popular 8 bit encoding of Unicode into multibyte character strings that can represent virtually every written language in history.  I presented the OpenAccess software changes required to fully support UTF-8 and showed you how to convert your existing application software to properly manipulate UTF-8 in the OpenAccess oaString class.

I once had a job scrutinizing Virtuoso schematics that contained many useful annotations written in Italian.  EDA tools generally support only ASCII strings, but the Italian designers were lucky–theirs is one of the few languages that can be written naturally using the same characters as English. Wouldn’t it be nice to annotate designs in OpenAccess databases using any of the world’s languages?  You can do it right now, using any OpenAccess release.

The PA system at work announced that I had a call. It was from Dr. Steve Butner, my graduate advisor at UC Santa Barbara . He was very excited. “John, I got some information here about this program that was just made for you.”

If you speak a foreign language, you would naturally like your children to learn it, too. However, look around you, and you will find that only a few children actually become fluent in their parents’ language, and fewer still can read or write it. We reared a Japanese/English bilingual daughter in the United States. To help you formulate a plan for your own family, I will describe the strategy we used.

When you read an SDC file from the command line, it works fine. When you read it using a Tcl procedure, it won’t work, because the global variables cannot be accessed. Here’s how to fix this annoying problem.

Last week I got an e-mail from a manager.  “I saw your name on some source code.  Nice job.  Here is some information that might interest you.”  Sweet.  By just  typing my name, I got information I needed, plus I have someone thinking nice things about me.  If you do good work, put your name on it.  If you do not do good work, well, you can stop reading right now.

Eclipse works great for me as an C++ integrated development environment (IDE) for OpenAccess -based applications. It supports all the same platforms as OpenAccess, and it’s free software. Here’s how to get started. Your comments and corrections are always appreciated.