On Thu, Sep 27, 2007 at 06:39:24AM +0000, Aaron Denney wrote: > On 2007-09-27, Deborah Goldsmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
You could get rapid seeks by ignoring the UTFs and representing strings as sequences of chunks, where each chunk is uniformly 8-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit as required to cover the characters it contains. Hardly anyone would need 32-bit chunks (and some of us would need only the 8-bit ones). _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
