Re: Nicest UTF

[Philippe Verdy]

If you need immutable strings, that take the least space as possible in 
memory for your running app, then consider using SCSU, for the internal 
storage of the string object, then have a method return an indexed array of 
code points, or a UTF-32 string when you need it to mutate the string object 
into another.

SCSU is excellent for immutable strings, and is a *very* tiny overhead above 
ISO-8859-1 (note that the conversion from ISO-8859-1 to SCSU is extremely 
trivial, may be even simpler than to UTF-8!)

From: "Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For internals of my language Kogut I've chosen a mixture of ISO-8859-1
and UTF-32. Normalized, i.e. a string with chracters which fit in
narrow characters is always stored in the narrow form.
I've chosen representations with fixed size code points because
nothing beats the simplicity of accessing characters by index, and the
most natural thing to index by is a code point.
Strings are immutable, so there is no need to upgrade or downgrade a
string in place, so having two representations doesn't hurt that much.
Since the majority of strings is ASCII, using UTF-32 for everything
would be wasteful.
Mutable and resizable character arrays use UTF-32 only.