Graeme Geldenhuys schrieb:
On 14/09/2011 19:17, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
How many users will have to deal with chars outside the Unicode BMP?
You are very narrow minded! It depends on the application you are
developing. Lets take a Science application as an example. Many
scientific symbols fall outside the BMP. Now lets take a another
example. Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Or a Music program. Or your next version
of Skype or some IM app using all those emoticons.
I'm well aware of that, but you failed to answer my question: How many
users?
And which of these users has already written code for your examples,
using 8-bit chars?
Looking at the following chart [see url below], Emoticons, Transport
and Map symbols, Alchemical Symbols, Pictographs, Playing Cards,
Mathematical symbols etc all fall outside the BMP. There are all symbols
that could quite easily be used in a variety of applications - so yes,
accessing symbols in Plane 1- 14 is rather important!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Multilingual_Plane#Supplementary_Multilingual_Plane
The applications we develop at our work use symbols outside the BMP -
Maths, Science, Alchemical etc..
Feel free to use symbols as you like :-)
But what's the difference in code, between using astral characters in
UTF-8 and UTF-16?
outside the BMP UTF-8 is a waste of space, and lacks indexed char
access in any case.
Yeah, and indexed access for UTF-16 encoded strings needs to check for
surrogate pairs too! Otherwise your app is not Unicode enabled but
rather UCS-2 only.
See above. If you honestly *want* to use the full range of Unicode
characters, you have to write appropriate code. But who will *force*
other coders to do the same?
When I want a program for German or French users, I'll hire an coder
with experience in those *languages*, not with experience only in Unicode.
And considering the amount of text processing apps I have written
(plenty of them), indexed character access is really not a top priority
or a often used feature.
Right, text processing deserves special coding, and again much more
experience than only with Unicode. Now tell me the number of coders,
which are *capable* of writing a text processing application, and how
many of these have problems with Unicode and encodings?
DoDi
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