From: Tim Bray <tbray@...>
Date: 2006-06-18T13:49:15+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On Jun 17, 2006, at 2:55 PM, Michal Suchanek wrote:

> First for reasons of efficiency. If an application is going to perform
> lots of slicing and poking on strings it will want some encoding that
> is suiatble for that such as UTF-32. If an application runs on system
> with little memory it will want space-efficient encoding (ie UTF-8 or
> UTF-16 for Asian languages).

Um, the practical experience is that the code required to unpack a  
UTF-8 stream into a sequence of integer codepoints (and reverse the  
process) is easy and very efficient; to the point that for "slicing  
and poking", UTF-8 vs UTF-16 vs UTF-32 is pretty well a wash.

  -Tim