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

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 08:02:30AM -0700, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:
> UTF-16 is the type used in all the APIs. Everything else is considered an 
> encoding conversion.
>
> CoreFoundation uses UTF-16 internally except when the string fits entirely 
> in a single-byte legacy encoding like MacRoman or MacCyrillic. If any kind 
> of Unicode processing needs to be done to the string, it is first coerced 
> to UTF-16. If it weren't for backwards compatibility issues, I think we'd 
> use UTF-16 all the time as the machinery for switching encodings adds 
> complexity. I wouldn't advise it for a new library.

I do not believe that anyone was seriously advocating multiple blessed
encodings.  The main question is *which* encoding to bless.  99+% of
text I encounter is in US-ASCII, so I would favor UTF-8.  Why is UTF-16
better for me?

Stefan
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