Re: Gnus: UTF-8 and compatibility with other MUAs

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Benjamin Riefenstahl <Benjamin.Riefenstahl@epost.de> writes:
[...]
> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>> But it doesn't solve the problem. 'cmp' still says the files are
>> different.  UTF-8 had a similar problem (overlong encodings) but
>> that has been fixed, UTF-16 and UTF-32 can't be.
>
> Actually UTF-8 still has that problem with composed vs. decomposed
> characters.  There is no perfect system AFAIK.

Just to be sure that I understand you correctly: Do you refer to the
fact here that a character like, say, U+00E9 (LATIN SMALL LETTER E
WITH ACUTE) is equivalent to U+0065 followed by U+0301 (LATIN SMALL
LETTER E followed by COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT)?

>> If normal computers was 16 bit, I could understand the trade-off,
>
> Depends of what you call "normal computers."  MS Windows and Apple's
> Mac OS X both use UTF-16 for APIs and internal implmentation.
[...]

I am not sure, but I think that the characters that need to be
accessed via surrogate pairs are meant to be rare, since they are
outside of the BMP. So AFAIK UTF-16 is meant as a space-efficient
format for East Asian text. But as I said: this is outside the scope
of things with which I have normally to deal with.

    Oliver
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