Markus Kuhn wrote:

> Now, who invented UTF-16?

I am basing this on my memory because I don't have the time to search the
documents.

I know that Joe Becker and Rick McGowan wrote the original paper about
developing a new UTF to extend UCS-2 to be able to cover about 10000000 (1
million) characters.  They did not call it UTF-16.  However, the proposed
UTF set the direction but was changed before being adopted by ISO in ISO/IEC
10646-1:1993 as amendment 1.  When Joe and Rick documented the scripts that
10646 and Unicode would need to code, they estimated the requirement at
about 250000 characters.  To allow for errors in the estimate, they
multiplied by 4 to make it 1 million characters.  This was somewhat larger
than a 16-bit code space of UCS-2.  The original proposal was refined and
resulted in the current UTF-16.  I am unsure if Mark Davis suggested the
current form of UTF-16.

Edwin F. Hart
Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Laurel, MD  20723-6099
USA
+1-443-778-6926 (Baltimore Area)
+1-240-228-6926 (Washington DC Area)
+1-443-778-1093 (facsimile)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
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