From: Clifford Heath <cjh_nospam@...>
Date: 2002-08-05T12:58:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode in Ruby now?

Curt Sampson wrote:
> These statements are both very wrong.

I was deliberately being "reinterpretive", but what I said is the effective
truth. If you want to do Unicode-3 correctly and simply, then a 32 bit
internal representation is the right one - surrogates simply recreate
exactly the same problems of variable-length encoding that plagued
earlier efforts at providing a simple way (for the programmer) to code
correctly. Externally, a more compact encoding is needed (utf-8 or utf-16
are valid choices), but internally, UTF-16 is bogus in the extreme.
Even internally, *if appropriately hidden* behind an API that only exposes
whole characters, a more compact encoding (such as I've recently
described) can be worthwhile.

You seem to be so wedded to the Java/Unicode model that you can't see
out of the hole into which you've dug yourself.

--
Clifford Heath