Messages in this thread | | | From | Steve VanDevender <> | Date | Tue, 21 Apr 1998 11:51:09 -0700 (PDT) | Subject | Re: unicode (char as abstract data type) |
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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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