On Sat, 2003-10-25 at 04:32, M. Fioretti wrote: > On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 21:24:44 at 09:24:44PM -0400, Mrs. Brisby ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) > wrote: > > > > FYI, nobody said internal use of "unicode" - just "UCS16". Plan9 > > doesn't. Linux doesn't. > > Not correct, unless I misunderstood the original question. At least > Red Hat started to use unicode (UTF-8?) as default setting in version > 8.0
You did; that's okay. UCS16 != UTF-8. It's just not. A good critical difference is that UTF-8 explicitly disallows null-bytes thus allowing any program's messages to be localized without rewriting the program itself (or with minimal rewrites)- thus the rather large appeal. UCS16 is a fixed-width encoding, and while it covers MOST of unicode, it's not possible to represent every code-point in UCS16, which is why the asian markets tend to avoid it like the plague. It doesn't help that it does nothing but waste disk-space in western markets, so you can understand I'm willing to be a bit critical of it :) Most deliberately unicode-aware task domains have chosen UTF-8- simply because it's a path of minimal resistance. Microsoft chose double-byte unicode encoding (often referred to as UCS16). If you want to develop collating and unicode-aware applications under Microsoft platforms, you DO need to work with UCS16. However, when your intent is portability, you tend to want to find common footholds. More systems are tolerant to UTF-8 than to UCS16. Period. Further: I always read statements like "Microsoft C/C++ is the largest most popular language platform in the world" as foolish sentiment. These people obviously don't know what they're talking about and need a good healthy dose of some reality. SQLite made the right decision to support UTF-8. It did it largely for technical reasons but maybe in SQLite 3.0 it'll be able to natively store binary blobs and MAYBE UCS-16 will be possible and convenient at that point. Too many rude users talk about how inconvenient their life now is because here is this wonderful and rather free toolkit that decided to make the life of the author easier- and most of it's users or potential users easier, at the expense of their own. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
