On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 1:46 AM, Ben Kloosterman <[email protected]> wrote:

> >For typical in-memory string manipulation, UCS-2 has served us well,
>
> I think this is just because UCS2 was the standard at the time and it was
> intended that documents use it.


There was a brief phase during Unicode-1.0 when a 16-bit external character
representation (not UCS2) was advocated. This died instantly because it
wasn't compatible with the overwhelming body of existing ASCII data in the
field.


> Most Asian chars can't be represented in UCS2 making it probably worse than
> the old Ascii encodings still in common use in Asia.
>

Actually, I'm not sure that's correct. What can't be represented in UCS2 is
the legacy encoding (shift-JIS and the other one whose name I don't
remember). The major Asian languages do have representations in the  16-bit
encoding space.

That said, there is a *huge* volume of data in those two older
representations, which means that for reasons of *data* compatibility we
need the full code point space.


shap
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