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SubjectRe: unicode (char as abstract data type)
Alex, this has passed most relevance to linux-kernel long ago.
Please take your misunderstanding of what Unicode is supposed to
do elsewhere.

Unicode is a _character set_. That is, it is a set of numeric
encodings for a set of symbols used in writing nearly all the
languages in the world today.

Apparently many people are unhappy that Unicode doesn't preserve
their home-grown 8-bit encodings for the characters used in their
languages, but with tens of thousands of characters to represent
that would be simply impossible. As it is many Japanese and
Chinese people are balking at Unicode because it uses the same
values for characters that appear identical in those two
languages but that have different meanings. That's because
Unicode is a _character set_; it's a code for a set of symbols
used in writing, and not for syntactic or semantic information.
If the same symbol is used in two different languages, even if it
has a different meaning or role, Unicode uses only one code for
it.

The current mish-mash of 8-bit encodings for various (mostly
Indo-European) languages means that one must do language tagging,
as the same character value could mean any number of different
characters in these different encodings. Many non-Indo-European
languages that use syllabic or ideographic characters could never
be stuffed into 8-bit encodings. If you use Unicode then you can
store and display documents that use any of those languages, or
even all of them together, without having to be continually
switching character set interpretations. It also means that
low-level applications (like the Linux kernel) can store any of
these characters and leave the hairy aspects of language-specific
intepretation to applications. If you want to do language
tagging in the Linux kernel itself, just so you can continue to
use your beloved koi-8 character set, you're introducing a huge
amount of potential bloat that doesn't belong there.

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