| |||||||||||
MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)Posted Mar 10, 2008 6:22 UTC (Mon) by Cato (subscriber, #7643)In reply to: MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld) by tialaramex Parent article: MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)
Windows and Java both initially supported UCS-2 (16 bit Unicode encoding) and both now support UTF-16 (21 bit Unicode), so Microsoft is really not much different to Sun in this respect. Reference on Microsoft support: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/DrIntl/columns/021/def...
(Log in to post comments)
Mono Posted Mar 10, 2008 11:18 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] It's true that Sun are just as bad, but that doesn't make Microsoft any better. And specifically it doesn't mean Mono's even lousier support is any good. I did single out Mono. I'm sure the Microsoft CLR has its problems, but it can manage to fall properly asleep and it does, (in current versions) more or less get Unicode handling correct, or close enough. What we have isn't a good clone of a terrible system, but a poor clone of a not-so-great system. Crossing out UCS-2 and writing UTF-16 in your documentation (when you even remember to say something more specific than just "Unicode") isn't enough. In any case, UCS-2 tends to get people into a mindset where they start thinking of a character, a code point, a code unit and a glyph as more or less the same thing, precisely the type of attitude that UTF-8 has been beating out of people developing in C or Perl. .NET inherits from Win32 certain APIs that implicitly make this mistake, and fixing them makes it awkward and unsettling. As with Java, the C# "wide character" built-in type is almost entirely useless, because it can only store a UTF-16 code unit, and in a high level language you almost never /want/ a UTF-16 code unit but instead need a character, which won't fit.
|
|||||||||||