Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, May 25, 2013 01:42:20 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 5/25/2013 12:33 AM, Joakim wrote:
> > At what cost?  Most programmers completely punt on unicode, because they
> > just don't want to deal with the complexity. Perhaps you can deal with it
> > and don't mind the performance loss, but I suspect you're in the
> > minority.
> 
> I think you stand alone in your desire to return to code pages. I have years
> of experience with code pages and the unfixable misery they produce. This
> has disappeared with Unicode. I find your arguments unpersuasive when
> stacked against my experience. And yes, I have made a living writing high
> performance code that deals with characters, and you are quite off base
> with claims that UTF-8 has inevitable bad performance - though there is
> inefficient code in Phobos for it, to be sure.
> 
> My grandfather wrote a book that consists of mixed German, French, and Latin
> words, using special characters unique to those languages. Another failing
> of code pages is it fails miserably at any such mixed language text.
> Unicode handles it with aplomb.
> 
> I can't even write an email to Rainer Schütze in English under your scheme.
> 
> Code pages simply are no longer practical nor acceptable for a global
> community. D is never going to convert to a code page system, and even if
> it did, there's no way D will ever convince the world to abandon Unicode,
> and so D would be as useless as EBCDIC.
> 
> I'm afraid your quest is quixotic.

All I've got to say on this subject is "Thank you Walter Bright for building 
Unicode into D!"

- Jonathan M Davis