🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <q++ygqb@rpi.edu> ncc1701@acm.rpi.edu writes:
>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?
[ much deleted ]
It's been a long time since I looked at 10646, but it was using a
scheme for 8, 16, and 32-bit encodings, and a code-page-select kind of
thing that gives you most of the 32-bit space for *each* language
(think of more like an encoding for a font rather than a character
set).

Also, because there was so much emphasis on the emerging Unicode
scheme, the ISO decided that 10646 and Unicode should be brought into
a single specification, so that all of Unicode would be a proper
subset of 10646.  (This entails some shuffling of small details on
both sides, of course, and will take some time to iron out.)  I
believe that the revised standard will come up for vote again around
the end of the year.

If you're *really* interested, the place to ask is your local National
Standards Body (ANSI, DIN, AFNOR, BSI, etc.).  They will (usually) be
happy to provide you with a current draft, if you claim that you have
a "material interest" in the standard.  (Your local NSB may have
slightly different rules, check with them.)  Usually, there is a
copying and handling fee, say US$ 50-150 range, depending.  I think
that 10646 really comes in several parts; one is the textual
explanation of how the encoding works, the others are the "glyph
sheets" that show what each character is supposed to look like for
each code in a particular code-page.  (You can imagine that this could
go into thousands of pages in total; you don't want *all* of them, do
you?  After all, this is supposed to cover almost every character ever
devised by man since writing began!)

And yes, since many C programs don't even handle 8-bit chars quite
correctly  (only 7 bits), there will be a *lot* of software that will
need to be rewritten extensively.  (And things like toupper() and
tolower() don't mean much for Kanji and many other writing systems.)
















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Fritz Whittington     Texas Instruments, 12840 Hillcrest #200, Dallas, TX 75230
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