On Oct 2, 2007, at 21:12 , Isaac Dupree wrote:
Stefan O'Rear wrote:
On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 11:05:38PM +0200, Johan Tibell wrote:
I do not believe that anyone was seriously advocating multiple blessed encodings. The main question is *which* encoding to bless. 99+ % of text I encounter is in US-ASCII, so I would favor UTF-8. Why is UTF-16 better for me? All software I write professional have to support 40 languages (including CJK ones) so I would prefer UTF-16 in case I could use Haskell at work some day in the future. I dunno that who uses what encoding the most is good grounds to pick encoding though. Ease of implementation and speed on some representative sample set of text may be. UTF-8 supports CJK languages too. The only question is efficiency
Due to the additional complexity of handling UTF-8 -- EVEN IF the actual text processed happens all to be US-ASCII -- will UTF-8 perhaps be less efficient than UTF-16, or only as fast?
UTF8 will be very slightly faster in the all-ASCII case, but quickly blows chunks if you have *any* characters that require multibyte. Given the way UTF8 encoding works, this includes even Latin-1 non- ASCII, never mind CJK. (I think people have been missing that point. UTF8 is only cheap for 00-7f, *nothing else*.) -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH