Re: Unicode and C++

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Tue, Jul 04, 2000 at 12:05:07AM +0200, Per Hedbor wrote:
> > Or in the GTK+ case, massive quantities of legacy code that has to
> > keep working. UTF8 is pretty easy to port to
> 
> Only if you live in the US or some other 8-bit challenged country.
>
> If you do not, you have to decode from UTF8 everywhere to support
> things like file-names,

Excuse me, but filenames, when in unicode, are written in utf-8.
UTF-8 was specifically designed to the purpose of allowing unicode in
filenames, another name of utf-8 isn't "file system safe UCS transformation
format" ?
And if the file names are not in unicode, then using UCS2 or UCS4 will
need a conversion anyway.

UTF-8 may have its problems, but it has a quality that far outweight
them: it can transparently be used on any existing byte-oriented program.
UTF-8 will be (and already is) the format used for any exchange of data
using the unicode character set: email, text files, etc.
So it indeeds makes sense to use UTF-8 as the base encoding.

What is really the problem with UTF-8 ? It is because it is multi byte ?
Is that really a problem ? (text data is inherently multibyte in most
scripts, think about composing chars)

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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