From: Tim Bray <tbray@...>
Date: 2006-06-18T14:04:35+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On Jun 17, 2006, at 4:15 PM, Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov wrote:

> I would much rather prefer UTF-8 in a language such as Ruby which  
> is often used as glue between
> other systems. UTF-8 is used for interchange and it's indisputable.  
> If you go for UTF-16 or UTF-32, you are most likely
> to convert every single character of text files you read (in text  
> files present in the wild AFAIK UTF-16 and UTF-32 are a minority,  
> thanks to the BOM and other setbacks).

There's a lot of UTF-16 out there.  There's more ISO-8859-* than  
that, and more Microsoft code-page-* text than everything else put  
together.  Yes, with UTF-16 & -32 you do a lot of byte swapping but  
it's pretty cheap and pretty reliable.  (I like UTF-8 too, but it's  
not without issues).

  -Tim