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Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals?

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On 04-02-2011 22:21, Ken Wesson wrote:
> On Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:02:37 -0800, Mike Schilling wrote:
>
>> "Arne Vajhøj"<arne@vajhoej.dk>  wrote in message
>> news:4d4ca055$0$23765$14726298@news.sunsite.dk...
>>> On 04-02-2011 19:37, Mike Schilling wrote:
>>>> "Joshua Cranmer"<Pidgeot18@verizon.invalid>  wrote in message
>>>> news:iii493$nn8$1@news.eternal-september.org...
>>>>> On 02/04/2011 05:26 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>>>> In message<iigcva$90q$1@news.eternal-september.org>, Mike Schilling
>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Yes, it does (contain 16 bits.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Yeah, I didn’t realize it was spelled out that way in the original
>>>>>> language
>>>>>> spec. What a short-sighted decision.
>>>>>
>>>>> It would have been stupider to have not specified a guaranteed size
>>>>> for char. Take C (+ POSIX), where the definitions of sizes are very
>>>>> loosely defined, and you very quickly get non-portable code. Yes, you
>>>>> can in theory change the size of, say, time_t independently of other
>>>>> types, but it doesn't do you much good if half the C code assumes
>>>>> sizeof(time_t) == sizeof(int). Pinning down the sizes of the types
>>>>> was a _very good_ move on Java's part.
>>>>>
>>>>>> Why was there a need to define the size of a character at all? Even
>>>>>> in the
>>>>>> early days of the unification of Unicode and ISO-10646, there was
>>>>>> already
>>>>>> provision for UCS-4. Did they really think that could safely be
>>>>>> ignored?
>>>>>
>>>>> Knowing the results of other properly Unicode-aware code in the first
>>>>> days of Unicode, I believe that Unicode quite heavily gave an
>>>>> impression of "Unicode == 16 bit". Java is not the only major
>>>>> platform to be bitten by now-Unicode-is-32-bits... the Windows
>>>>> platform has 16-bit characters embedded into it.
>>>>
>>>> .NET, which in several cases took advantage of following Java to
>>>> correct some of its mistakes (e.g. signed bytes), didn’t fix this one.
>>>
>>> Which is a bit surprising since high code points were introduced when
>>> .NET came around.
>>>
>>> But they probably had a compatibility issue with p/Invoke and Win32
>>> API, COM interop, C++ mixed mode etc. that all had to work with
>>> existing Win32 model of 16 bit wchars.
>>
>> Or, relentless micro-optimizers that they are, Microsoft wasn't willing
>> to bite off the size/performance issues.
>
> Relentless micro-optimizers of what, their cashflow?

Micro optimization in the meaning it has among programmers.

Arne

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Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-02-04 22:30 -0500
  Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-02-07 19:16 -0500
  Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-02-07 18:26 -0500
  Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-02-06 11:15 -0500
    Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Ken Wesson <kwesson@gmail.com> - 2011-02-07 04:15 +0100
  Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Ken Wesson <kwesson@gmail.com> - 2011-02-05 07:15 +0100
    Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2011-02-06 09:25 -0500
  Re: Why No Supplemental Characters In Character Literals? Ken Wesson <kwesson@gmail.com> - 2011-02-05 04:48 +0100

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