On 2007-09-27, Deborah Goldsmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sep 26, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Aaron Denney wrote: >>> UTF-16 has no advantage over UTF-8 in this respect, because of >>> surrogate >>> pairs and combining characters. >> >> Good point. > > Well, not so much. As Duncan mentioned, it's a matter of what the most > common case is. UTF-16 is effectively fixed-width for the majority of > text in the majority of languages. Combining sequences and surrogate > pairs are relatively infrequent.
Infrequent, but they exist, which means you can't seek x/2 bytes ahead to seek x characters ahead. All such seeking must be linear for both UTF-16 *and* UTF-8. -- Aaron Denney -><- _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
