Simon Cozens wrote:
>
>...
> > Furthermore, the Unicode character set has tens of thousands of empty
> > spaces.
>
> Urgh, this is tricky. Once you move outside of the BMP, the encodings you
> *really* want to work stop working.
Don't follow.
> > If Chinese and Japanese computer scientists scream loudly enough
> > they can have their characters separated into different planes.
>
> Why will they bother screaming loud enough? Unicode doesn't do what they want
> and JIS/SJIS/EUC/whatever does.
But where do they get their software?
Microsoft and Sun are making it near impossible to use any character set
other than Java internally with their recent APIs. So I'd like to know
more about whether Japanese and Chinese people are really using
something other than Unicode or whether they are just using variant
encodings for data that their software treats internally as Unicode. I
know for sure that Java and Mozilla treat everything inside as Unicode.
I have strong reason to believe that goes for most Microsoft software
also.
If every bit of modern software only uses non-Unicode encodings but
always works with the Unicode character set (And I don't know if that's
true!) then why would it matter if programming languages had intrinsic
support for non-Unicode character sets?
Paul Prescod
