[Haskell-cafe] Re: PROPOSAL: New efficient Unicode string library.

[ChrisK]

Deborah Goldsmith wrote:

> UTF-16 is the native encoding used for Cocoa, Java, ICU, and Carbon, and
> is what appears in the APIs for all of them. UTF-16 is also what's
> stored in the volume catalog on Mac disks. UTF-8 is only used in BSD
> APIs for backward compatibility. It's also used in plain text files (or
> XML or HTML), again for compatibility.
> 
> Deborah


On OS X, Cocoa and Carbon use Core Foundation, whose API does not have a
one-true-encoding internally.  Follow the rather long URL for details:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/CFStrings/index.html?http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/CFStrings/Articles/StringStorage.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20001179

I would vote for an API that not just hides the internal store, but allows
different internal stores to be used in a mostly compatible way.

However, There is a UniChar typedef on OS X which is the same unsigned 16 bit
integer as Java's JNI would use.

-- 
Chris