Jane, One of the problems is that early Unicode adopters used the 16 bit UCS-2 encoding for of Unicode. Converting to UTF-16 requires surrogate support. Some of the GB18030 characters require this support. ICU is dedicated to Unicode support so a lot of effort is put into ICU to keep it up to date with the latest Unicode version. Operating systems take longer to adapt.
Some Unix systems adapted faster because the later Unicode adopters used 32 bit Unicode characters making the job 100 times easier. Other companies like Microsoft took a very big gamble and implemented the code for surrogate support into Windows 2000 based on early drafts of the Unicode standard. If they had not done it this way or had guessed wrong they might not even have support in Windows XP. I takes years to change operating systems and do it right. That is why it is best to use packages like ICU if you really want up to date Unicode support. > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:unicode-bounce@;unicode.org]On > Behalf Of xjliu_ca > Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 2:48 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: IBM AIX 5 and GB18030 > > > Dear I18N experts, > > I have searched all the web on IBM about the support of GB18030 in OS > AIX 4.3 and 5, but didn't find anything. I only can see they support > GB2312 and GBK. > > I know IBM was one of the pioneer to support GB18030, i.e. their ICU. > But it doesn't make sense their AIX doesn't support it ? > > Please shed some lights ! > > Thanks ! > > Jane > > >
