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From: "François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>
Cc: davidk@lysator.liu.se (David Kågedal), ding@gnus.org
Subject: Re: "Coding system"?  Eh?
Date: 11 Sep 1998 10:27:03 +-400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <oqu32e2094.fsf@icule.progiciels-bpi.ca> (raw)
In-Reply-To: Gisle Aas's message of "10 Sep 1998 22:21:22 +0200"

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


  reply	other threads:[~1998-09-11  6:27 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 15+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
1998-09-05 16:01 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
1998-09-05 16:31 ` Michael Welsh Duggan
1998-09-05 20:07   ` Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
1998-09-05 20:45     ` Hrvoje Niksic
1998-09-05 21:12       ` Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
1998-09-05 21:47         ` Hrvoje Niksic
1998-09-07 15:12     ` David Kågedal
1998-09-09 18:50       ` François Pinard
1998-09-10 12:45         ` David Kågedal
1998-09-10 20:21           ` Gisle Aas
1998-09-11  6:27             ` François Pinard [this message]
1998-09-11  6:16           ` François Pinard
1998-09-11 16:14         ` Hallvard B Furuseth
2002-10-20 23:13       ` Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
1998-09-09 18:59         ` François Pinard

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