🚀 go-pugleaf

The following answers are based off of second-hand info, and possibly
not correct due to faulty memory, so take with a grain of salt :-)


mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn) writes:

>- How is ISO 10646 structured? Is it a 16 or a 32 bit character set?

I believe it's 32, since 65,536 characters aren't enough to support
EVERY language (especially the Chinese and Japanese character sets)
unless you leave out a bunch.

>- What subsets are defined in ISO 10646?

Not sure what you mean by subsets.  Language sets?  If so, it'll
(or, _should_) support all the characters available (European
(not hard, since mostly the same), Asian, Arabic, and any other
one I forgot :-)  No, more like every character set for every
country that is likely to have computer systems.  Does that make
sense? Or am I babbling...

>- How does it relate with US-ASCII, ISO Latin 1 and Unicode?
>- What's the standard's status today (DIS?)? When will it be published
>  officially?
>- What requirements are there for application programs (editors, etc.)
>  and libraries if they what to handle ISO 10646 files?
>- Has anyone already written a short ISO 10646 FAQ list with answers?
>- What else should a computer science student know about ISO 10646 
>  in the future?
No idea.  However, it will present some difficulties for programmers
since they (especially non-Asian ones) tend to think of strings
as being made up of 8 bit entities.  The Japanese and Chinese already
use 16 bits, so they might have somewhat an easier time converting

I also heard there might be prefix codes to determine the language
to be selected.  I'm not sure how that'll be implemented though--does
that mean there will be lots of holes in the 32 bit character map?

On the other hand, that'll make converting from native formats easier
(i.e. American set could be prefix xxx, with standard ASCII codes
following two 0's  ->   'A' = prefix 00 00 41 (hex))  The Japanese
I am sure, would like that a lot :-)  Save them a lot of work

-Mark

>Markus

>-- 
>Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -=-=- University of Erlangen, Germany
>Internet: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de  |  X.500 entry available
>------------------ ISO?  Nicht immer. Aber immer öfter! -------------------
-- 
---
Mark "Emerson" Chadwick -- ncc1701@acm.rpi.edu    chadwickmo@space.laafb.af.mil