> >From this point of view, Unicode is pretty pointless. Why go to all
> the trouble of unification, panic about what you can fit in 16 bits,
> and negotiate the design issues, when you can just support everything
> by adding another escape code?
Well, the point is that current software works beautiful in the given
environment but stops working as soon as you want it to use in other
environments. Or, like in my case, I want to be able to write
multi-language documents. In both cases supporting a special
multi-byte encoding isn't enough and in the later case it isn't even
enough to support multiple encodings since only one can be in effect
at any time.
Take a look at today's commercial products. There are special Asian
versions and probably several more. This is not what I think is the
right way and most software houses agree. The costs for supporting
only one encoding (= ISO 10646) is much less than supporting N
different programs. For free software this will also hold.
> If I'm right, I predict we'll see East Asian software that uses UTF-8
> to encode Unicode, and then mixes other variable-width encodings
> within that, using the same escape mechanisms they do now.
Perhaps in an intermediate period. The problem (as described above)
is that we still cannot share the programs than. Once the people see
the benefits of a unified charset they hopefully will be willing to
spend one time energy on converting the existing programs so that from
now on the programs can be used everywhere.
> "Stop whining and code like real men," say the East Asians.
I don't think people will favour a program which deals with multibyte
encodings. They are slower, this is a fact.
-- Uli
---------------. drepper at gnu.org ,-. Rubensstrasse 5
Ulrich Drepper \ ,-------------------' \ 76149 Karlsruhe/Germany
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