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Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files
From: |
Keith Marshall |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files |
Date: |
Sun, 23 Jul 2017 18:57:21 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.4.0 |
On 23/07/17 13:39, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
>> What's the rationale for choosing UTF-16 in the first place?
>
> History. Microsoft plumped for UCS-2, both UCS-2BE and UCS-2LE
> I think.
That's not as I recall it: UCS-2, yes, but always UCS-2LE, (since their
focus was on Intel x86 -- a little-endian memory organization, so only
little-endian UCS-2 would be useful for representation of wchar_t).
> That's a fixed width; two bytes per rune. When that became
> insufficient, UTF-16 was a backwards-compatible upgrade AIUI.
Yep. Yet another of Bill's "no one will ever need more than 640kB of
memory" moments, IIRC: "16-bits should be sufficient to represent any
character which anyone will ever want to display". Of course, he was
wrong on both counts, and when they realized that 16-bits wasn't going
to be enough, they changed their definition of Unicode[*] to represent
UTF-16LE, and added support for surrogate pairs to the APIs.
[*]: When Microsoft documentation refers to "Unicode", they invariably
mean UTF-16LE; they seem reluctant to as much as acknowledge that any
other variant exists; (there are a few rare, hard to find, instances
where UTF-7 or UTF-8 are mentioned ... and then, usually to caution
against using them).
--
Regards,
Keith.
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, (continued)
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Peter Schaffter, 2017/07/21
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Ralph Corderoy, 2017/07/21
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Peter Schaffter, 2017/07/21
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Ralph Corderoy, 2017/07/22
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Keith Marshall, 2017/07/22
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Ralph Corderoy, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Mike Bianchi, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, John Gardner, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Ralph Corderoy, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, John Gardner, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files,
Keith Marshall <=
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, E. Hoffmann, 2017/07/22
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Mike Bianchi, 2017/07/22
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Mike Bianchi, 2017/07/22
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Steffen Nurpmeso, 2017/07/22
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Ralph Corderoy, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, E. Hoffmann, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files, Dale Snell, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files SOLVED, E. Hoffmann, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files SOLVED, Dale Snell, 2017/07/23
- Re: [Groff] mom : unicode in .INCLUDE'd files SOLVED, E. Hoffmann, 2017/07/25