Markus, > You seem to suggest that there is a problem with 16-bit Unicode. > It does take some effort to adapt > UCS-2-designed functions for UTF-16, but it's not "rocket > science" and works very well thanks to the > Unicode allocation practice (common characters in the BMP). > Making UTF-8/32 functions work with > supplementary code points when they had assumed BMP-only > operation probably took some work too.
Converting from UCS-2 to UTF-16 is just like converting from SBCS to DBCS. For folks who think DBCS it is no problem. Those who went from DBCS to Unicode to simplify their lives I am sure are not happy. I think that worst problem is that many systems still sort in binary not code point order. Then you get Oracle and the like wanting to set up a UTF-8 variant that encode each surrogate rather than the character. However, 16 bit characters were a hard enough sell in the good old days. If we had started out withug 2bit characters we would still be dreaming about Unicode. Carl
