UTF-16

Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:48 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: UTF-16 by ikm
Parent article: Resetting PHP 6

Unicode and i18n is a long history of "but this thing people write in real life is hard, can't I simplify it to make my latin-oriented code simpler?"

And a few years later the pressure has mounted enough you do need to process the real thing, not a simplified model, and you need to do the work you didn't want to do in the first place *and* handle all the weird cases your previous shortcuts generated.

The "good enough" i18n school has been a major waste of development so far. It has proven again and again to be shortsighted

UTF-16

Posted Mar 25, 2010 13:04 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (2 responses)

> you do need to process the real thing, not a simplified model

You see, no, I don't. I have other stuff in my life than doing proper support for some weird stuff no one will ever actually see or use in my program.

UTF-16

Posted Mar 25, 2010 16:48 UTC (Thu) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link] (1 responses)

You see, no, I don't. I have other stuff in my life than doing proper support for some weird stuff no one will ever actually see or use in my program.

And what exactly makes you the final authority on using UTF?
While you may have no need to represent ancient Chinese characters, others may.
Just because you don't need it doesn't mean that others won't have use for it.
Your argument smacks of "640K should be enough for anyone" (misattributed to BillG).

UTF-16

Posted Mar 25, 2010 17:06 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link]

Oh, no no, I was only referring to my own private decisions. The original post stated the necessity for each and every one, and I disagreed. Others decide for themselves, of course.

p.s. And btw, you *can* represent ancient Chinese with UTF... The original post was probably referring to some much more esoteric stuff.