🚀 go-pugleaf

terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:

>Consider that Runic encoding is antithetical in terms of single character
>changes for fixed record length files by virtue of it's ability to either
>change record size (destroying the seek-offset record addressing) or by
>changing the amount of data representable in a field (destroying the
>ability to use fixed-length fields for input in the front end client).

The C type Rune has been defined in the Tompson paper about Plan 9 Unicode
encoding as "unsigned short" = 16bit per character. The 1+ byte encoding is
called by all people UTF (there are different versions, Plan 9 uses UTF-2).
I believe you mixed up the meanings of UTF encoded and Runic encoding.

It seems to be absolutely obvious that there are many applications,
where a fixed length runic encoding with 16 bit/character is useful.
That's also the reason, why UTF <-> Rune translation routines (which
are very easy to implement) have been included in Plan 9 libraries.

There are also very good reasons to use UTF, especially, where 
compatibility with ASCII is of benefit.

Sorry, I don't understand your problem at all.

Markus

-- 
Markus Kuhn, Computer Science student -=-=- University of Erlangen, Germany
Internet: mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de  |  X.500 entry available
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