how can i use ISO-8859-1??

[Gary Kline]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 12:39:41AM +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 03:16:08PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote:
> > > Because it is a hiddeous waste for most readers and writers of
> > > English and other European languages.
> 
> > 	I also argured that utf-8 was a waste of a whole byte per char
> > 	for most of us.
> 
> That's not true. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding. It is backwards
> compatible with ASCII, i.e. ascii characters are one byte in UTF-8 as
> well. Are you thinking about UTF-16?


	I don't know.  (Mark Twain.)  Back in the late 1990's I was
	assigned the project of converting all the utilities I had ported
	to three European languages.  Until now I had no idea there was
	anything *but* utf-16, i.e. 2-bytes/char.  

	With memory seriously getting to be dirt-cheap, "wasting 8-bits
	doesn't seem that big a deal.  Maybe some future wizard will
	invent a UTF-32 that will hold all ~90 000 Chinese characters and
	these will be downsized automatically to UTF-8 when you're mixing
	Mandarin with, say, Cesk [Czeck].  

	Hmm, somebody just told me that "aigu" is not English but French
	and means "acute".  ...all these years i thought ... oh well.
	Anyway, do you know if '\0351' is a 16-bit character?  is is 0xE9
	and decimal 233 and certaing should fit into a byte.   just
	wondering.

	gary


> 
> Roland
> -- 
> R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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-- 
 Gary Kline  kline at thought.org  http://www.thought.org  Public Service Unix
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