Questions about Unicode, particularly Japanese

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:18:54 -0400, Ruslan Nikolaev  
<nruslan_devel at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Sorry, if it's again top post in your mail clients. I'll try to figure  
> out what's going on later today.

It appears as a top-post in my newsreader too.

>
>
>>
>> 1. Am I correct in all of that?
>
> Yes. That's the reason I was saying that UTF-16 is *NOT* a lousy  
> encoding. It really depends on a situation. The advantage is not only  
> space but also faster processing speed (even for 2 byte letters: Greek,  
> Cyrillic, etc.) since those 2 bytes can be read at one memory access as  
> opposed to UTF-8. Also, consider another thing: it's easier (and  
> cheaper) to convert from ANSI to UTF-16 since a direct table can be  
> created. Whereas for UTF-8, you'll have to do some shifts to create a  
> surrogate for non-ASCII letters (even for Latin ones).
>
> What encoding is better depends on your taste, language, applications,  
> etc. I was simply pointing out that it's quite nice to have universal  
> 'tchar' type. My argument was never about which encoding is better -  
> it's hard to tell in general. Besides, many people still use ANSI and  
> not UTF-8.

Wouldn't this suggest that the decision of what character type to use  
would be more suited to what language you speak than what OS you are  
running?

-Steve