On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Ben Kloosterman <[email protected]> wrote:
> It is correct ( I live in China at the moment) > First, thank you for correcting me. The outcomes of Unicode are complex and sometimes counter-intuitive. It is very useful to get actual data from those who use it. For me, this is especially true in the Asian language context. I speak and write enough languages to have a handle on the right-left issue and the European language families in a broad sense, but I have no experience with ideographic languages or with Han, Kanji, the various Kanas, or the Chinese syllabary. And much of African language is totally beyond my experience. > ...and is why China has made it illegal for systems to only represent the > basic plane ( UCS2)... > OK. This raises a practicum question. Is .Net legal in China? I ask because .Net takes a middle position. While .Net strings can represent the full Unicode code point space, the .Net char datatype is ucs2 (not utf-16 - chars are strictly 16 bit entities). When dealing with code points outside the basic plane, it is necessary to manipulate them as strings. Java, I think, does the same thing. >From the standpoint of runtime compatibility, BitC almost *has* to pick ucs2 characters. We can support ucs4 in parallel if we get the string issues right. So my question: is the .Net solution considered acceptable under Chinese law? Whether it is or not, is it acceptable in actual practice? > I don’t think *data *compatability is an issue , im not sure I understand > this , all systems have ways of converting to and native formats . > There are two important compatibility issues: one has to do with serialization. That is laborious and case-intensive, but I agree with you that it is straightforward. The other has to do with cross-language runtime compatibility. That one is trickier. shap
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