RE: Properties of multibyte encodings

From: Greg Hullender (greghull@microsoft.com)
Date: Tue Nov 25 1997 - 12:25:13 EST


What might make it more interesting (and more relevant) to this group would
be if you explained why you don't use Unicode instead? You could support
import/export of a host of other encodings, but do all internal processing
in Unicode. Is there some reason why that doesn't work for you?

I'm not sure even SJIS satisfies your criteria, actually, since it doesn't
exactly match ASCII in the 00-7F range (backslash and tilde change to
yen-sign and macron) and SJIS certainly is stateful, in that you cannot
index into the middle of a string and be sure what character you are seeing.

--Greg

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nitsan Seniak [SMTP:seniak@ilog.fr]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 1997 7:34 AM
> To: Multiple Recipients of
> Subject: Properties of multibyte encodings
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm not sure this is the right place for posting this question --
> but I don't know of any other mailing list talking of i18n issues.
>
> I'm currently working on the internationalization of a product
> for asian countries, especially Japan. For implementation reasons,
> I'm considering only supporting multibyte encodings with the
> following properties:
>
> 1. They are a superset of ASCII, which means that a character starting
>
> with a byte in the range [0x00, 0x7F] is a one-byte ASCII
> character;
> 2. They don't use shift states (ie, a multibyte character can always
> be interpreted independently of the ones which precede it.)
>
> Does anybody knows if these restrictions are reasonable? I know that EUC
>
> and SJIS are OK, and that JIS isn't; will not supporting JIS cut a big
> part of the market? Thanks for any advice.
>
> -- Nitsan Seniak
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
> Nitsan Seniak net: seniak@ilog.fr
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