🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6066@utzoo.UUCP>, henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
> > As far as character sets go, it would seem that 16 bits (65536
> > possible characters) should be more than enough...
> 
> The trouble with this (and the other similar proposals) is it asks the
> Western world to pay a factor of 2 in storage overhead for the sake of
> the Asian character sets.

I think the proposals are that a coding scheme for text be defined which
allows 16-bit characters to be escape-coded into an 8-bit text stream.
The arguments mostly center on what kind of coding scheme would fit both
the needs of few-16-bit-char folks and few-8-bit-char folks without wasting
too much storage for either.

Internally to an international program, characters would be 16 bits,
but stdio routines (printw, fprintw, sscanw, etc) would encode to a
bytestream on the way in and out.  ("w" for "world" or "wide").

(Hmm, the non-Unix-opsys people have been looking for a way to tell when
we Unixoids are reading or writing a text file versus a binary file...now
that we propose encoding our own text files, they will have the clue.)