GNU ed 1.6 released

Posted Jan 3, 2012 0:56 UTC (Tue) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644)
In reply to: GNU ed 1.6 released by geuder
Parent article: GNU ed 1.6 released

I think the only problem with the article is that it means 8-bit character *encodings*, where the encoding of the character set uses 8 bits (e.g. UTF-8), rather than 7 (e.g. UTF-7), regardless of how many bits are required by the character *set* (20 for all proper unicode encodings such as both UTF-7 and UTF-8).

Anyway, whatever that wikipedia article means, it's kind of a red herring, as "ed" being 8-bit clean means that it can handle both 8 bit character sets (e.g. ISO-8859-*) and 8-bit character encodings (e.g. UTF-8).

GNU ed 1.6 released

Posted Jan 3, 2012 19:39 UTC (Tue) by blitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873) [Link] (1 responses)

UTF-8 is a variable width encoding. It sounds like they now have support for something like extended ASCII.

This is not true...

Posted Jan 3, 2012 20:01 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

UTF-8 is not just run-of-the-mill variable-length encoding. Ken Thompson modified original IBM's proposal to make sure most algorithms which treat strings as sequence of 8-bit characters were still usable with UTF-8.

This means that yes, you can easily use UTF-8 with programs like GNU ED or GNU M4 which know absolutely nothing about UTF-8 but correctly support 8bit characters in strings.