Oops, my bad... [was: Re: tlug: unicode ]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

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tlug note from "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>
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>>>>> "Craig" == Craig Oda <craig@example.com> writes:

    Craig> This makes me wonder what being "unicode" compliant really

>>>>> "me" == Stephen J Turnbull <turnbull@example.com> writes:

    me> It's complicated, like most of this stuff.  For one thing,
[ snip ]
    me> To fix this, the full Universal Character Set uses 4 bytes,
    me> and allows the Japanese to use JIS code and the Taiwanese GB
    me> and so on.

Boo-boo: GB is mainland, Big 5 and CNS are Taiwan.

    Craig> me.  I hear that Java is unicode compliant, but again I'm

    me> Unicode-compliant mostly means not trashing 16-bit codes.
    me> This is mostly a problem for C-like string processing, I
    me> believe.

Also, Unicode does not reserve lots of extra space for various forms
of control characters; the entire 31-bit code space under UCS-4 is
available for character codes.

One other problem that I forgot to mention with the Unicode approach
is that ditching locales means that you lose date and currency
information.  It is of course arguable that the _character codes_
should be universal, while things like preferred glyph style (as
described in the referenced post) should be included with dates and
currency formats in the locale.  So even if we go to Unicode, locales
are probably here to stay.

-- 
                            Stephen J. Turnbull
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences                    Yaseppochi-Gumi
University of Tsukuba                      http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tel: +81 (298) 53-5091;  Fax: 55-3849              turnbull@example.com
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