On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:39:41AM +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 03:16:08PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> > > Because it is a hiddeous waste for most readers and writers of
> > > English and other European languages.
>
> > I also argured that utf-8 was a waste of a whole byte per char
> > for most of us.
>
> That's not true. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding. It is backwards
> compatible with ASCII, i.e. ascii characters are one byte in UTF-8 as
> well. Are you thinking about UTF-16?
I don't know. (Mark Twain.) Back in the late 1990's I was
assigned the project of converting all the utilities I had ported
to three European languages. Until now I had no idea there was
anything *but* utf-16, i.e. 2-bytes/char.
With memory seriously getting to be dirt-cheap, "wasting 8-bits
doesn't seem that big a deal. Maybe some future wizard will
invent a UTF-32 that will hold all ~90 000 Chinese characters and
these will be downsized automatically to UTF-8 when you're mixing
Mandarin with, say, Cesk [Czeck].
Hmm, somebody just told me that "aigu" is not English but French
and means "acute". ...all these years i thought ... oh well.
Anyway, do you know if '\0351' is a 16-bit character? is is 0xE9
and decimal 233 and certaing should fit into a byte. just
wondering.
gary
>
> Roland
> --
> R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
> [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
> pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
--
Gary Kline [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix
http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
_______________________________________________
[email protected] mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
