Re: [Nmh-workers] nmh architecture discussion: format engine character set

[Earl Hood]

On 8/11/2015 11:28 AM, Ken Hornstein wrote:

> AFAICT ... there is probably no advantage in using UTF-16 or UTF-32
> versus UTF-8.

They actually bring in disadvantages.

Using UTF-16 or 32 may be desirable in some locales where their language
characters are presented by larger value codepoints, so something in
UTF-16 may actually take up less space than UTF-8.  The size saving is
only in specific locales.  For the Latin-based locales, UTF-16 will
actually take up more space than UTF-8.


> So given that, I think sticking with UTF-8 is preferrable; it has the
> nice property that we can represent text as C strings and it's just
> ASCII if you're living in a 7-bit world.

Agreed.

--ewh