Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: PROPOSAL: New efficient Unicode string library.

In message wnoise@ofb.net writes:

On 2007-09-27, Deborah Goldsmith wrote:

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On Sep 26, 2007, at 11:06 AM, Aaron Denney wrote:

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UTF-16 has no advantage over UTF-8 in this respect, because of surrogate pairs and combining characters.

Good point.

Well, not so much. As Duncan mentioned, it's a matter of what the most common case is. UTF-16 is effectively fixed-width for the majority of text in the majority of languages. Combining sequences and surrogate pairs are relatively infrequent.

Infrequent, but they exist, which means you can't seek x/2 bytes ahead to seek x characters ahead. All such seeking must be linear for both UTF-16 *and* UTF-8.

And in [Char] for all these years, yet I don't hear people complaining. Most string processing is linear and does not need random access to characters. Duncan