Re: Should we care much about this Unicode-ish criticism?

[Bart Lateur]

On 05 Jun 2001 11:07:11 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>Particularly since part of his contention is that 16 bits isn't enough,
>and I think all the widely used national character sets are no more than
>16 bits, aren't they?

It's not really important.

UTF-8 is NOT limited to 16 bits (3 bytes). With 4 bytes, UTF-8 can
represent 20 bit charatcers, i.e. 6 times more than the "desired number"
of 170000. See <http://czyborra.com/utf/#UTF-8> for how it this is done.

And the major flaw that I see in acceptance of Unicode, is that the
Unicode "text" files are not Ascii compatible. UTF-8 file are. That
makes for a very nice upgrade path.

-- 
        Bart.