On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 4:05 PM, J Decker <d3ck0r at gmail.com> wrote:
> windows W is wide-char not utf-16. > as much as A is ansi and isn't utf-8 > Has Windows ever supported a wide character set that was not UCS-2 or UTF-16? I've always understood Microsoft embraced UCS-2 specifically so that it would not have to deal with future encoding changes. Obviously it failed to an extent when UCS-2 was deprecated in favor of UTF-16, but since UTF-16 is backward compatible as long as you don't need surrogate pairs, it wasn't too painful of a transition. Especially when compared to the plethora of 8 bit multibyte encodings. Note: I know Windows has supported DBCS for various encodings / code pages, but those are never passed to wide functions. I find it kind of interesting that Microsoft takes a lot of (deserved) flack for not adhering to standards, yet UTF-8 came about specifically because some didn't want to use UCS-2 (then simply known as UCS, the one and only true flavor of the Universal Character Set). Had Microsoft come up with it first, I'm sure they'd be crucified by some of the same people who today are critical of them for using wide characters instead of UTF-8! Note: I still wish they supported UTF-8 directly from the API. -- Scott Robison
