On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 09:36:00 +0300 Eli Zaretskii via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:23:40 +0100 > > From: Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> > > > > On Thu, 24 Aug 2017 17:17:10 +0000 > > Andre Schappo via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote: > > > > > So, I consider it important to familiarise students with SMP > > > characters as well as BMP characters. Then when they develop > > > software they will, at the start, be thinking beyond ASCII and > > > Unicode BMP characters. > > > > Just steer them away from UTF-16! > > Which will leave them entirely unprepared for the MS-Windows Unicode > programming, something they of course will never need in their > careers. It shouldn't. UTF-16 works just like UTF-8, except that the code units are bigger. The problem is that accidentally ignoring the difference between UTF-16 and UCS-2 takes longer to be detected, and therefore correcting the error may be very difficult. Ignoring the difference between ASCII (or an 8-bit coding) and UTF-8 shows up very quickly, and therefore is less difficult to fix, for less is broken by the obvious correction. Richard.
