Re: unicode (char as abstract data type)

Matthias Urlichs (smurf@work.noris.de)
21 Apr 1998 11:51:04 +0200


Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> writes:
>
> Don't put your words in my mouth. 8-bit charscters sets exist along with
> multibyte ones, and both work. In the same applications, too. Unicode
> "simplifies" that by creating one multibyte encoding that does *NOT*
> provide features that any other encoding do, so regardless of having

Yes it does. It provides _one_ encoding which doesn't depend on arbitrary
context.

> Not really. It requires amount of resources, that with proper
> standardization coule be enough for real internationalized software,
> and _still_ solves nothing except "pretty foreign letters in a document"
> problem.
>
It solves the "arbitrary letters in a document" problem. The decision of
which font or which language or which whatever to use has been left out.

IMHO, that's a Good Thing for the simple reason that there needs to be a
migration path from _somewhere_ to UTF-8/Unicode/whatever. If they designed
the thing with language/font/whatever in it, it'd be no longer compatible
with ASCII. The Chinese would probably be pleased about that, but if nobody
at all is going to use the standard you don't need one in the first place.

Anyway, they also avoided the squabbles on what is or is not a separate
language which would be unavoidable if they'd tackled that one.

-- 
Matthias Urlichs
noris network GmbH

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