Re: question about Unicode

[Rici Lake <lua@...>]

On 7-Dec-06, at 7:52 AM, David Jones wrote:
> Actually dealing with shift-state dependent multi-byte encodings in a 
> portable way in C makes the infinite horrors of Unicode and UTF-8 seem 
> very attractive.

I think Unicode is blamed for a lot of things that are not really its 
fault. Correctly rendering all the languages of the world, potentially 
mixed in the same document, is an inherently difficult problem, not 
because of the encoding scheme but because of the complexity of the 
rendering rules.

Unicode, although not perfect, is a valiant attempt to deal with these 
complexities in a way which allows semantic analysis and still makes 
reasonable rendering possible. Most of its flaws (and I would count 
precomposed characters as a flaw) are, sadly, the result of political 
compromises without which Unicode would never have been adopted at all.