On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 12:13 PM, Deborah Goldsmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > That article is missing several concepts which are essential for > understanding Unicode; like many programmers, Mr. Spolsky thinks of Unicode > as "wide ASCII", which it is not. The article doesn't cover surrogate pairs > (the fact that he uses the term UCS-2 instead of UTF-16 shows he's not up to > date) or combining sequences (grapheme clusters). If you're going to go > groveling through Unicode text, you need to understand both.
He uses UTF-16 as well. I don't think that he doesn't understand surrogate pairs or otherwise treats Unicode as wide ASCII. In fact, I think the main point of the article was to drive home the point that the simple 1:1 mapping of glyphs to bytes that ASCII exhibits isn't even a valid concept in the world of Unicode, and gave a primer on why this is the case. Hence the "Absolute Minimum" part of the title. > This article is a bit stuffy, but also more complete, and is even shorter (I > think): > > http://unicode.org/standard/principles.html > > This is also good: > > http://icu-project.org/userguide/unicodeBasics.html Of course these have the added benefit of being more likely correct, since their authors work on Unicode or software implementations. :) I didn't mean to tread on your toes here, I just find that Joel's article is a very good way to quickly get programmers to understand that Unicode is a very different beast, and that it really does matter. --Kyle Sluder _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
