Re: Nicest UTF

[Arcane Jill]

Probably a dumb question, but how come nobody's invented "UTF-24" yet? I 
just made that up, it's not an official standard, but one could easily 
define UTF-24 as UTF-32 with the most-significant byte (which is always 
zero) removed, hence all characters are stored in exactly three bytes and 
all are treated equally. You could have UTF-24LE and UTF-24BE variants, and 
even UTF-24 BOMs. Of course, I'm not suggesting this is a particularly 
brilliant idea, but I just wonder why no-one's suggested it before.

(And then of course, there's UTF-21, in which blocks of 21 bits are 
concatenated, so that eight Unicode characters will be stored in every 21 
bytes - and not to mention UTF-20.087462841250343, in which a plain text 
document is simply regarded as one very large integer expressed in radix 
1114112, and whose UTF-20.087462841250343 representation is simply that 
number expressed in binary. But now I'm getting /very/ silly - please don't 
take any of this seriously.)  :-)

The "UTF-24" thing seems a reasonably sensible question though. Is it just 
that we don't like it because some processors have alignment restrictions or 
something?

Arcane Jill
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Behalf Of Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk
Sent: 02 December 2004 16:59
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Nicest UTF
"Arcane Jill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Oh for a chip with 21-bit wide registers!
Not 21-bit but 20.087462841250343-bit :-)
--
__("< Marcin Kowalczyk
\__/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/