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

[Russ Allbery]

Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Doesn't really matter where they install the artificial cap, because for
> philosophical reasons Perl is gonna support larger values anyway.  It's
> just that 4 bytes of UTF-8 happens to be large enough to represent
> anything UTF-16 can represent with surrogates.  So they refuse to
> believe in anything longer than 4 bytes, even though the representation
> can be extended much further.  (Perl 5 extends it all the way to 64-bit
> values, represented in 13 bytes!)

That's probably unnecessary; I really don't expect them to ever use all 31
bytes that the IETF-standardized version of UTF-8 supports.

> I don't know if Perl will have a utf16 that is distinguised from UTF-16.

I wouldn't bother spending any time on UTF-16 beyond basic support for
converting away from it.  It combines the worst of both worlds, and I
don't expect it to be used much now that they've buried the idea of
keeping Unicode to 16 bits.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>