Wide characters support in D

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 06/08/2010 03:12 AM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Nick Sabalausky"<a at a.a>  wrote in message
> news:huktq1$8tr$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> "Ruslan Nikolaev"<nruslan_devel at yahoo.com>  wrote in message
>> news:mailman.128.1275979841.24349.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
>>> In addition, C# has been released already when UTF-16 became variable
>>> length.
>>
>> Right, like I said, C#/.NET use UTF-16 because that's what MS had already
>> standardized on.
>>
>
> s/UTF-16/16-bit/  It's getting late and I'm starting to mix terminology...

s/16-bit/UCS-2/

The story is that Windows standardized on UCS-2, which is the uniform 
16-bit-per-character encoding that predates UTF-16. When UCS-2 turned 
out to be insufficient, it was extended to the variable-length UTF-16. 
As has been discussed, that has been quite unpleasant because a lot of 
code out there handles strings as if they were UCS-2.

Andrei