Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:27:18 +0300 | From | Adrian Bunk <> | Subject | Re: [2.6 patch] UTF-8 fixes in comments |
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On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 01:06:38PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote: > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 01:42:16PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 12:09:34PM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote: >... > > > Unicode yes, UTF-8 no. UTF-8 is a compressed encoding of unicode. > > > That's as silly as if you had to replace your terminals to read > > > native gzip, and expect them as well as all the tools to work > > > properly! > > > > It's not a compressed encoding, it's a variable-length encoding. > > > > Besides the size advantages one main advantage of UTF-8 is that ASCII is > > valid UTF-8. This means that for the ASCII source code in the kernel it > > doesn't matter whether it's treated as ASCII or UTF-8, and no conversion > > was needed. > > > > You can't get this property with a fixed-size Unicode encoding. > > I don't agree. If you refuse character-set mixing, there's no problem. > Bit 7 of first char == 1 ? => full text is 32 bit.
You miss my point.
The point is: A conversion "ASCII -> UTF-8" is a nop.
This means when changing the kernel from half a dozen charsets used in comments to UTF-8 we only had to change the few characters actually containing non UTF-8.
Going to something like UTF-32 as you suggest would have involved converting every single file in the kernel.
> Willy
cu Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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