<rant>Unicode stupidity</rant> (Was: Unicode support)

["Jürgen A. Erhard"]

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>>>>> "Marcin" =3D=3D Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak@knm.org.pl> writes:

    Marcin> 30 Sep 2001 22:28:52 +0900, Jens Petersen <petersen@redhat.com>=
 pisze:
    >> 16 bits is enough to describe the Basic Multilingual Plane
    >> and I think 24 bits all the currently defined extended
    >> planes. [...]

Just for reference... "currently" is the important word here.

[Snipped interesting and (hopefully) enlightening stuff about Unicode
and marketing]

    Marcin> IMHO it would have been better to not invent UTF-16 at all
    Marcin> and use UTF-8 in parallel with UTF-32. But Unicode used to
    Marcin> promote UTF-16 as the real Unicode, and now it causes so
    Marcin> many threads on Unicode list to clear the confusion about
    Marcin> the nature of characters above U+FFFF.

IMPPOO is would have been (and would still be) better to simply say
"Here's UTF-8, and ISO 10646 is 31 bits, encoded as real 32 bit units
or as UTF-8".  That's the baseline.

None of that "But 21 bits *is* enough".  Yeah, like 640K was enough.
And countless other examples.

I thought we had learned, but I was wrong...  I'm especially
disheartened to hear that ISO bought into the same crap.

Bye, J

PS: Yep, this has been an entirely off-topic rant.  I simply couldn't
resist the urge, the need, to vent a bit.

--=20
      J=FCrgen A. Erhard  (juergen.erhard@gmx.net, jae@users.sf.net)
                     My WebHome: http://jerhard.org
       SPACE: Above And Beyond (http://www.planetx.com/space:aab)
         I have a firm grip on reality, now I can strangle it.

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