On 2011-10-20 17:30, Luca Olivetti wrote: > > "Additionally, 16 bits is enough to cover the BMP, Basic Multilingual > Plane, which encompasses the majority of today's most widely used > languages. Only when you get to more advanced codepoints in some of the > far-eastern languages, or are needing to encode dead languages such as > Egyption hieroglyphics do you need more than 16 bits."
That is such a rubbish statement! More and more information is being added outside the Unicode's BMP. Emoticons, Science and Maths symbols, Map Symbols (often seen in GPS applications), Music notes etc etc. So it's not just far-eastern or "dead" languages any more... Using the Supplementary Plane of Unicode will become a lot more used in the near future. So UTF-16's usage of surrogate pairs will become more common place. And this is where UTF-8 will shine once again, because nothing will need changing in the programmers code - selecting a BMP or Supplementary code point is identical. Programmers using UTF-16 often don't bother checking for surrogate pairs, treating UTF-16 like UCS2 - BIG MISTAKE! This is why I think UTF-8 is a much safer choice. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
