Re: 64-bit extensions

[Mike Griebling <grieblm@trt.allied.com>]

Tim wrote:

> Hallo!
> 
> > But: All support OOC could give is a new data type, conversion
> > functions between standard CHAR and this type, and a set of library
> > modules like Strings & friends.  But no Unicode IO.  I doubt that
> > anyone would gain something with these changes.
> 
> This is enough and would make it possible to write a number of modules
> parallel to the existing ones for CHAR. And it would allow to interface to
> a OS which supports Unicode, too. However it seems like there is Unicode
> (16 bit), UCS (31bit), utf-8 (pack in 8bits portions) etc... One has to
> look which is most common on the difernets OSs and which is covered by
> f.e. posix, C language definition to do the implementation of UNICHAR,
> HUGECHAR or whatever its name will be right from the beginning.

The UTF format is actually a variable-width coding with from 8- to
24-bit characters.  The BeOS uses it.  Unicode seems to be more
prevalent but doesn't have the range or the encoding efficiency of UTF.
Of course all these fancy encodings are useless without some fonts
which actually use these encodings.  I am ignorant of font technologies.
Do standard Postscript fonts or ATM fonts support these encodings?

Michael G.