Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Wed, 20 Aug 1997 15:51:51 +0200 (MET DST) | | From | Andries.Brouwer@cwi ... | | Subject | Re: UTF-8, OSTA-UDF [why?], Unicode, and miscellaneous gibberish |
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Alex Belits:
: really? If I'll use filenames how they are represented in filesystem (say, : UTF-8) and the rest of text in 16-bit encoding, it will be impossible to : edit unless the editor knows where filenames are
: Because everyone will have to encode/decode them on every file operation : if they really want to preserve system calls. Should I explain why it's : important to have trailing 8-bit zero in all strings that are passed to : kernel? But UTF-8 is unusable as the internal format -- even regexps on it : will become a monster. So, again hello horrible 8 -> 16 -> 8 : conversions on every operation with text...
Not so pessimistic... Plan 9 did everything internally in 16-bits, and the conversion was not very difficult. On the other hand, when I was working on this stuff (two years ago?) I used UTF-8 internally, which has the big advantage that nobody notices that it is not ASCII or Latin-1 and almost no conversion is needed. It is very easy to teach regexp routines which bytes start a character.
Andries
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