Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2008 16:08:40 -0700 From: Gary Kline <kline@thought.org> To: Roland Smith <rsmith@xs4all.nl> Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: how can i use ISO-8859-1?? Message-ID: <20080909230840.GB54455@thought.org> In-Reply-To: <20080909223941.GC65291@slackbox.xs4all.nl> References: <20080909043503.GA21663@thought.org> <20080909165456.GA56556@slackbox.xs4all.nl> <20080909121430.M12798@qroenaqrq.6qbyyneqvnyhc.pbz> <20080909221608.GB51272@thought.org> <20080909223941.GC65291@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
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On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:39:41AM +0200, Roland Smith wrote: > On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 03:16:08PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote: > > > Because it is a hiddeous waste for most readers and writers of > > > English and other European languages. > > > I also argured that utf-8 was a waste of a whole byte per char > > for most of us. > > That's not true. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding. It is backwards > compatible with ASCII, i.e. ascii characters are one byte in UTF-8 as > well. Are you thinking about UTF-16? I don't know. (Mark Twain.) Back in the late 1990's I was assigned the project of converting all the utilities I had ported to three European languages. Until now I had no idea there was anything *but* utf-16, i.e. 2-bytes/char. With memory seriously getting to be dirt-cheap, "wasting 8-bits doesn't seem that big a deal. Maybe some future wizard will invent a UTF-32 that will hold all ~90 000 Chinese characters and these will be downsized automatically to UTF-8 when you're mixing Mandarin with, say, Cesk [Czeck]. Hmm, somebody just told me that "aigu" is not English but French and means "acute". ...all these years i thought ... oh well. Anyway, do you know if '\0351' is a 16-bit character? is is 0xE9 and decimal 233 and certaing should fit into a byte. just wondering. gary > > Roland > -- > R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ > [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] > pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725) -- Gary Kline kline@thought.org http://www.thought.org Public Service Unix http://jottings.thought.org http://transfinite.thought.org
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