William_J_G Overington <[email protected]> wrote: > The idea is that there would be an additional UTF format, perhaps UTF-64, > so that each character would be expressed in UTF-64 notation using 64 bits, > thus providing error checking and correction facilities at a character level.
Error detection and correction at the character level is considered very old-fashioned now. Modern techniques such as Reed-Solomon codes[1] are much more effective and involve much less overhead than the 100% in the proposal above. Such techniques are already used in modern disc storage[2], and when combined with RAID techniques[3] provide better data protection than character-level redundancy ever would. In any case, I think issues of error detection and correction are quite outside the scope of Unicode. Cheers Jim [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction#Data_storage [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID -- Jim Breen Adjunct Snr Research Fellow, Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University
