🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Dec31.203101.5447@prl.dec.com> boyd@prl.dec.com (Boyd Roberts) writes:
>There are two problems:
>    1. Getting an encoding of the characters.
>    2. Getting local conventions right.
>Problem 2 is hard.  Problem 1 should not address problem 2.

Oops. Nice try. Come again.

The ONLY reason people invent charcter encoding standards is to
"get local conventions right". If you've got your own machine which
does not communicate with others you can choose your own arbitrary
encoding.

A good encoding should support easy (i'd say natural) localization.
It should provide simple algorithms for simple functions
like getting string length, searching a character, case-insensitive
comparison, lexicographical comparison.

Unicode (and for that matter Plan 9 UTF) does not support the last
two mentioned functions. I have yet to see Plan 9 _sort_ which will
sort Russian strings without being told explicitly that it is Russian.

>Plan 9 utf solves Problem 1.

UTF does not solve the problem 1 -- it is merely a way to encode
16-bit unsigned integers in the way which (supposedly) will not
aggravate the ASCII world.

--vadim