On Wed, Apr 18, 2001 at 02:29:13PM +0100, John Levon wrote:
> On 17 Apr 2001, Lars Gullik [iso-8859-1] Bjønnes wrote:
>
> > This is planned, except that wchar_t is 32 bit on most os's.
>
> Wouldn't this have an enormous space impact on those of us who don't
> need it ? I thought the point of UTF-8 was that ASCII could be
> stored in 7-bit values ?
>
> I admit I don't know anything about this sdtuff ;)
I, however, do. Aside from being a
physicist-turned-computer-programmer, an LaTeXpert, and a former LyX
Devvie, I'm also a hobby-linguist. Human languages fascinate me (gee,
as if you couldn't tell from my translation guide...), from grammar to
orthography.
This is why, while in my local Borders, I decided to pick up a copy of
the Unicode v3.0 standard when I saw it. I recently got on a Unicode
kick, have been adding Unicode fonts and emacs Unicode support, and am
generally having fun looking at the different writing systems we
humans have invented.
So, I guess I'll officially offer myself as an information source for
Unicode. If I don't know it, I can always pick up my copy of the
standard and look it up. I'll keep an eye out for any threads on this
list with "unicode" in the subject line.
And, yes, the intent of UTF-8 was to be able to combine Latin-1 ASCII
text with other characters, without having to resort to making the
entire document wchar_t based. Oh, and Unicode specifies ways for
mixing LRT and RTL text. Dekel, are you listening? ;)
--
John Weiss
"Not through coercion. Not by force. But by compassion. By
affection. And, a small fish." -His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama
