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Re: Unicode support

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Christoph Becker wrote:

> Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
>> Christoph Becker wrote:
>>> I recently read, that UTF-8 is not available on many Windows PCs in
>>> Taiwan, where `BIG5' is still prevalent, what would be very unfortunate.
>> 
>> I would like to see proof of that.  While possible, I consider it
>> unlikely. Taiwan is especially intertwined with the Western world (being
>> the location of major local hardware manufacturers, and major foreign
>> investments on the doorstep to mainland China), and Traditional Chinese
>> as written in Taiwan was one of the first scripts to be covered by
>> Unicode, with CJK Unified Ideographs, in 1992.
> 
> I'm quite sure now, that I was mistaken.  It is not UTF-8 support that
> is missing on the PCs, but rather that the file systems are using BIG5
> by default,

But not NTFS, I presume?

> what is of course something quite different.  Sorry for the incorrect
> information.

Never mind.
 
>> Windows has been supporting Unicode, and came pre-installed with Unicode-
>> capable fonts since Windows NT (and so, Windows 2000).  Did not Windows
>> XP support end last year?
> 
> According to <http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/endofsupport.aspx>
> support of Windows XP SP3 ends on April 8, 2014.

That is good to know.  However, it should be noted that (at Microsoft) there 
are different levels of support, and there are different versions of Windows 
XP.  Mainstream Support and Extended Support for some versions of Windows XP 
has ended already:

<http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?sort=PN&alpha=Windows+XP&Filter=FilterMS&msdate=0>

We are now looking forward to the date that *all* support will be 
discontinued for *all* versions of Windows XP (as there will be no more 
Service Packs).

>>> […] if I'm not mistaken, the situation won't change with PHP 5.5. :(
>> 
>> That would be a pity.  Native Unicode support was announced for PHP 6
>> before those plans were abandoned.  I wonder, what can be that hard in
>> implementing it?  Apparently even Perl managed the transition years ago
>> although it requires a few extra lines per script.
> 
> Native Unicode support was planned to be resp. already partially
> implemented by using UTF-16 internally throughout.  It seems, that
> several PHP developers had concerns about the performance and memory
> overhead of doing so.  Obviously no agreement could be found, and on
> March 11, 2010 Rasmus Lerdorf `decided' to delay PHP 6 and the Unicode
> support.[1]

Thanks.  ISTM that PHP developers are struggling with the same issues as 
Python developers did once.  UTF-16 is considerably large, but string 
operations (like determining string length) are fast within the BMP.  UTF-8 
is small for low code points, but harder to deal with.  UTF-32 covers more 
than the BMP, and would allow fast operations, but is wasteful of precious 
memory.  (As of Python 3.3, Python uses an encoding that attempts to get the 
best of both worlds.)

Still, a UTF-8 pragma like in Perl would not be such a bad idea for PHP.  
Only those who need it would use it.

> Of course there are several extensions handling UTF-8 quite well, but
> these may not be available on shared web hosting services, and anyway
> it's quite ugly to have e.g. strlen('€')===3 when dealing with UTF-8.

The same issue exists with characters outside the BMP in ECMAScript 
implementations which uses 16-bit characters (usually one UTF-16 code unit 
per character).  But you can work around that rather efficiently.
 
> [1] <http://news.php.net/php.internals/47120>

I will read that later.


PointedEars
-- 
    realism:    HTML 4.01 Strict
    evangelism: XHTML 1.0 Strict
    madness:    XHTML 1.1 as application/xhtml+xml
                                                    -- Bjoern Hoehrmann

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mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated oldyork90 <oldyork90@yahoo.com> - 2013-03-19 20:49 -0700
  Re: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2013-03-20 06:42 -0400
    Re: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated oldyork90 <oldyork90@yahoo.com> - 2013-03-20 07:09 -0700
      Re: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2013-03-20 15:29 +0100
        Re: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated The Cat in the Hat <doctor@suess.com> - 2013-03-20 21:58 +0000
          UTF-8 charset (was: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated) Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> - 2013-03-20 23:45 +0100
            Re: UTF-8 charset (was: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated) The Cat in the Hat <doctor@suess.com> - 2013-03-20 23:13 +0000
              Re: UTF-8 charset The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-20 23:31 +0000
              Re: UTF-8 charset "M. Strobel" <sorry_no_mail_here@nowhere.dee> - 2013-03-21 10:11 +0100
                Re: UTF-8 charset adrian@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid (Adrian Tuddenham) - 2013-03-21 14:31 +0000
                Re: UTF-8 charset The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-21 16:22 +0000
                Re: UTF-8 charset "M. Strobel" <sorry_no_mail_here@nowhere.dee> - 2013-03-21 18:05 +0100
                Re: UTF-8 charset Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2013-03-22 01:17 +0100
                Re: UTF-8 charset Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> - 2013-03-22 01:55 +0100
                Unicode support (was: UTF-8 charset) Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2013-03-22 02:16 +0100
                Re: Unicode support Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> - 2013-03-30 13:57 +0100
                Re: Unicode support Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2013-03-30 14:25 +0100
                Re: Unicode support The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-30 14:33 +0000
                Re: Unicode support Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> - 2013-03-30 15:55 +0100
                Re: Unicode support The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-30 18:04 +0000
                Re: Unicode support Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> - 2013-03-30 21:26 +0100
                Re: Unicode support The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-30 21:26 +0000
                Re: Unicode support Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> - 2013-03-30 23:14 +0100
                Re: Unicode support The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-30 22:29 +0000
                Re: Unicode support "M. Strobel" <sorry_no_mail_here@nowhere.dee> - 2013-03-31 14:10 +0200
                Re: Unicode support The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-31 13:41 +0100
                Re: Unicode support "M. Strobel" <sorry_no_mail_here@nowhere.dee> - 2013-03-31 19:12 +0200
                Re: Unicode support Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2013-03-30 20:18 +0100
                Re: Unicode support Christoph Becker <cmbecker69@gmx.de> - 2013-03-30 21:05 +0100
                Re: Unicode support Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2013-03-30 21:19 +0100
                Re: Unicode support "M. Strobel" <sorry_no_mail_here@nowhere.dee> - 2013-03-31 14:06 +0200
                Re: Unicode support "M. Strobel" <sorry_no_mail_here@nowhere.dee> - 2013-04-02 19:59 +0200
                Re: Unicode support The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-30 14:29 +0000
                Re: UTF-8 charset The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-22 10:50 +0000
                Re: UTF-8 charset "M. Strobel" <sorry_no_mail_here@nowhere.dee> - 2013-03-22 09:46 +0100
                Re: UTF-8 charset "M. Strobel" <sorry_no_mail_here@nowhere.dee> - 2013-03-21 18:36 +0100
                Re: UTF-8 charset [OT] adrian@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid (Adrian Tuddenham) - 2013-03-21 18:22 +0000
                Re: UTF-8 charset [OT] "Peter H. Coffin" <hellsop@ninehells.com> - 2013-03-21 15:00 -0500
                Re: UTF-8 charset [OT] Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2013-03-22 01:47 +0100
            Re: UTF-8 charset The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2013-03-20 23:20 +0000
              Re: UTF-8 charset Scott Johnson <noonehome@chalupasworld.com> - 2013-03-20 16:39 -0700
          Re: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated Jerry Stuckle <jstucklex@attglobal.net> - 2013-03-20 23:29 -0400
          OT: Xnews mime-proxy (was: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated) BootNic <bootnic.bounce@gmail.com> - 2013-03-21 10:53 -0400
        Re: mysql dynamic binding and pass-by-ref deprecated oldyork90 <oldyork90@yahoo.com> - 2013-03-21 06:43 -0700

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