Last change: Sunday, June 6, 2004 11:51 am
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material on this page created by Diomidis Spinellis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Greece License.
Unicode defines an adequate character set but an unreasonable representation. The Unicode standard states that all characters are 16 bits wide and are communicated in 16-bit units.... To adopt Unicode, we would have had to convert all text going into and out of Plan 9 between ASCII and Unicode, which cannot be done. Within a single program, in command of all its input and output, it is possible to define characters as 16-bit quantities; in the context of a networked system with hundreds of applications on diverse machines by different manufacturers, it is impossible.
The UTF encoding has several good properties. By far the most important is that a byte in the ASCII range 0-127 represents itself in UTF. Thus UTF is backward compatible with ASCII.
Last change: Sunday, June 6, 2004 11:51 am
Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material on this page
created by Diomidis Spinellis is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Greece License.