Re: Ada and UNICODE?

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Joel says

<<OC Systems supports the UTF-8 coding method for UNICODE (i.e. ISO).  We
felt that the ISO standard was the intention for wide_characters and so
chose the standard text (non-wide character) representation of UNICODE.
UTF-8 is supported by Netscape and might become part of the next revision
of html.

Other than Netscape I am unsure about the availability of tools and such
related to UTF-8 (or unicode at all).  I think that newer versions of
operating systems are coming out (or will come out) with some sort of
support for wide_characters but I think that despite the amount of time
this has been an issue it is still in its infancy.
>>

So far we have not found any of our Japanese or Chinese users using
UTF-8. There are already plenty of operating systems that fully
support Japanese and Chinese characters (I have sitting on my shelf
the Japanese version of windows). THe most common coding methods
we have run into in Japan are EUC and SHift-JIS, and in China, the
modified upper bit approach is used (80h bit signals wide character).

It sure would be nice if UTF-8 would become a standard, supporting
umpteen different coding methods for wide character is a pain!