Re: "Coding system"? Eh?

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Gisle Aas <aas@sn.no> écrit:

> Unicode is in sync with ISO 10646.  Also Unicode allocates characters
> above U+FFFF.  http://www.unicode.org/unicode/alloc/Pipeline.html.

Thanks for the reference, I'll later take a look when I'll be on the net.

> > The difference between UTF-16 and UCS-2 is that it can encode some of
> > the charaters outside the Unicode range (BMP).  So I guess Unicode has
> > no need for UTF-16.

> Unicode 2.x is in a way UTF-16.

Yes, I got that feeling, even if I did not buy the books (it becomes
expensive after a while, when you use your own money for it :-).

There is some sadness in all this.  The original idea was to have the
capability of a set of fixed width characters covering all spoken languages.
Look were we are now.  UTF-16 is a variable width code, we have a lot of
combining characters, and various marks for byte order, for directionality,
and so forth.  Many characters are missing (to the point this creates me
problems within `recode'), and a non-negligible fraction of Japanese users
are highly irritated by Han unification, and other things.

Many people still think Unicode / ISO 10646 is another step of mankind
towards God, but if look a bit inside, you'll see that reality has run
and caught back progress, pretty fast, sadly enough.

-- 
François Pinard                            mailto:pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
Join the free Translation Project!    http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard