Op Tue, 2 Dec 2008, schreef Michael Schnell:
Nobody talks in this case about UTF-8. Even *ANSIstrings* in there
native meaning can contain multi byte chars, there are *multi byte* ansi
char sets.
If there is a widely used multi-byte ANSI encoding, why so we need Unicode ?
IMHO the introduction of Unicode has been necessary as (like you suggested)
multi-byte ANSI encoding was commonly ignored nearly completely and there
never has been _compiler_ support for them.
What compiler support should be necessary to handle i.e. EUC-JP? You want
a variable of type char to contain the JIS-0213 coordinates?
Unicode, and in particular UTF-8, has not taken off either because
languages got support for it. In fact, the most common language, C, has no
string support at all.
One reason Unicode has taken off because of document exchange, which in
the internet age got very common. Another reason is the growing importance
of the Far East, developers want therefore better support for the Far East
languages, but note this Unicode motivation exists mainly for Western
software developers.
Daniël
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