[TUHS] Character sets

[bqt@update.uu.se (Johnny Billquist)]

On 2016-03-27 23:49, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Sunday, 27 March 2016 at 13:47:43 +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On 2016-03-27 13:29, John Cowan wrote:
>>> Johnny Billquist scripsit:
>>>
>>>> On 2016-03-27 08:18, Greg 'groggy' Lehey<grog at lemis.com> wrote:
>>>>> Isn't it wonderful that we no longer have issues with character
>>>>> representation?
>>>>
>>>> I hope that comment was meant as a joke, ironic, cynical, or whatever...
>>>
>>> Undoubtedly.  But things *are* much better than they used to be:
>>> we can now do everything within a single character set, and convert
>>> only at the boundaries (and increasingly, only in one direction).
>>
>> Haha. Yes... Except that you now have multiple representations of each
>> character within one character set. So what has improved???
>
> In the Good Old Days, characters were all the same size, and you could
> do nice, simple things like
>
>    while (*c && *c++ != " ");
>
> Now you need a whole library to do the same thing.

Another one I noted a while ago was that functions and command in Unix, 
such as lpq, which try to print things in nice columns now fail, because 
the code don't actually know how many characters have been output.

And let's not even talk about such wonderful concepts as colors in the 
character set definition... Unicode seems to have it all... I wonder how 
many code points exist for 'A'. It's definitely more than one...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol