🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep4.203521.4099@adobe.com> caro@adobe.UUCP  (Perry A. Caro) writes:
>P.S.
>Speaking of bigger, why oh why is UNICODE 16-bit based?  Can you say
>major byteswapping headaches?  I still think Xerox's interpreted sequence
>of bytes, with infinitely expandable space, is the better solution.

Actually, Unicode is a 16-bit standard, and explicitly NOT a 2-octet
standard, specifically to avoid byteswapping problems. And I have to say,
as a former Xeroid who actually wrote part of the multilingual text
system, that XCCS (the Xerox Character Coding Standard) was a pain in
the patooties as far as actual use. There were times when you had to
back up a fair distance in your string to find out how the heck to
interpret what the codes meant. I seem to recall a fateful car ride one
day back in '87 with Joe Becker and Lee Collins when we decided that
a *real* character encoding would be uniformly 16-bit, since computers
were growing up and memory wasn't as dear as it used to be in the days
of $300 for 16K for your Apple II...

Dave Opstad
Line Layout Weenie