FW: Unicode and C++

[Shiv Shankar Ramakrishnan]

|Not in the C++ standard, which leaves it implementation-defined.

Oh! I wasn't aware of that. I guess that creates another royal mess ...

|> It seems that for most of the living languages 16bit UTF-16 or the
|> BMP plane of ISO-10646 is more than enough.
|
|It is by far not enough. Assignments to plane 1 and plane 2 are in
|progress; plane 14 is reserved for language tagging. See the Unicode
|Consortium pages for details.

I had a dekko at it. They are adding things like Klingon! and scholarly
and ancient languages. Thats why I said 'living languages' and its a
stated goal to fit all of the living languages in the BMP only. So it
doesn't  matter if you have to use surrogate pairs for the unusual
langs. After all you do make things easy and fast for 95% of the case. 

But yes I do see the point in having one simple 32bit character. But it
seems so extravagant for most data. Is it a political decision to have
wchar_t as 32 bit due to old EUC stuff for *NIXes or is there a purely
technical reason? After all if you can have UTF-8 favouring ASCII then
why can't you have UCS-2 (UTF-16) favouring the BMP Unicode? Seems rea-
sonable to me. I'm sure Europeans don't particularly relish UTF-8 for
penalising Latin-1 to 2 bytes each.
Thanks,
Shiv