Hamilton Richards
At 12:20 PM -0500 9/29/01, Colin Paul Adams wrote:
I have just been reading through the Haskell report to refresh my memory of the language. I was surprised to see this:
The character type Char is an enumeration and consists of 16 bit values, conforming to the Unicode standard [10].
Unicode uses 24-bit values to identify characters.
According to the official Unicode web site [0],
The Unicode Standard defines three encoding forms that allow the same data to be transmitted in a byte, word or double word oriented format (i.e. in 8, 16 or 32-bits per code unit).
You have to distinguish between encodings (you refer to utf-8, utf-16 and utf-32) and the unicode (iso-10646) tables of codepoints themselves. 16 bits is enough to describe the Basic Multilingual Plane and I think 24 bits all the currently defined extended planes. So I guess the report just refers to the BMP. Jens