🚀 go-pugleaf

> Date: Tue, 15 Jun 93 18:39:06 +0200
> From: avr@mtfmi.att.com
>
> Glenn Adams writes:
>> The most pernicious of the problems, #1 above, can now be solve fairly well
>> thanks to the new ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 Universal Character Set standard (and
>> Unicode, the more fully specified 2-byte form of this new standard).
>> However, problems remain in the actual use of Unicode; e.g., the possibility
>> of having a NUL octet embedded in a 2-byte character encoding.  [In Unicode,
>> a coded character must be interpreted as a full 16-bit wide character,
>> and not as a string of octets such as are found in multi-byte encodings
>> like JIS.]
>
> Rob Pike and Ken Thompson have proposed a very elegant solution
> to the "Unicode problem" in their recent "Hello World or..."
> paper...

I discussed this solution later in my article, under the heading of
UTF-2:

 The problems with interchanging and processing 16-bit and 32-bit encoding
 forms may be alleviated through the use of a transformation format.  Two
 formats have been defined (one in 10646), UTF-1, and another by
 JTC1/SC22/WG15, UTF-2.  The latter is currently used by the AT&T Plan 9
 operating system ...

Perhaps you didn't recognize the name UTF-2.  It is also called FSS-UTF,
for File System Safe UTF, although this only applies to ASCII file systems,
and not, for example, an EBCDIC based file system.

Glenn Adams