Hardly. Try UTF-7 or ISO 2022 if you want a truly hideous format; or
the rapidly deprecated UTF-1. Alex, you're already on record as
having an axe to grind because UTF-8 doesn't assign single-byte
characters to Russian characters, so I presume everyone already know
to take what you're saying with a grain of salt.
UTF-8 is actually very well done given the constraints imposed on it.
Yes, it's a compromise, but it had to be.
As far as Unicode being irritating (responding to the > > > poster
above); I think we have to remember that internationalization is
*hard*, and part of why it's hard is because for the longest time you
couldn't even write any language other than bastardized English
(bastardized because you couldn't write words like naďve or résumé
properly). Now, with 8-bit charsets being common, people living in
countries where 8 bits are enough (especially ISO 8859-1 countries)
are whining about the complexity of supporting more than 8 bits.
I really would hate to see Linux falling behind in this area.
-hpa
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I am Bahá'í -- ask me about it or see http://www.bahai.org/
"To love another person is to see the face of God." -- Les Misérables
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