About classifying operating system support for Unicode -
how about having more specific attributes for "support of Unicode"?
For example:
- API functions taking or returning characters and strings
- provide UTF-8 locale version for MBCS-type strings,
or other mechanism to select UTF-8 as MBCS-format
- accept strings in 16b UCS-2, ignoring surrogate pairs
- accept strings in 16b UTF-16, supporting surrogate pairs
(example: go forward one character may be forward 2 words,
count characters in string, is character digit, etc.)
- accept strings in 32b UCS-4
- functions for Unicode-based cultural sorting, upper-/lowercasing, etc.
- limited to the BMP (UCS-2)
- limited to planes 0-16 (UTF-16)
- all UCS (UCS-4, UTF-8)
- conversion APIs
- convert from/to MBCS codepages to/from UCS-2 but not UTF-16
- convert from/to MBCS codepages to/from UTF-16
- convert from/to MBCS codepages to/from UCS-4
- convert from/to UTF-8 to/from UCS-2 but not UTF-16
- convert from/to UTF-8 to/from UTF-16
- convert from/to UTF-8 to/from UCS-4
- encode/decode UTF-16 into/from SCSU
- file names, names for semaphores, pipes, etc.
- can contain any BMP characters
- can contain any characters on planes 0-16 (UTF-16 range)
- can contain any UCS characters (UCS-4, UTF-8)
- UI system
- integrated into base system or tightly integrated class library
- accepts, displays, and allows entering characters from
- the BMP
- planes 0-16 (UTF-16 range)
- all UCS (UCS-4, UTF-8)
- has a "complete" font
- has layout engines for which language groups?
- can display characters that it does not have a
layout engine for in some rudimentary manner
- can display distinct codes for unknown characters/unassigned
code points (e.g. hex digits in character cell)
- uses (possibly) remote terminals
- passes characters transparently to
accept, display, and allow entering characters from
- the BMP
- planes 0-16 (UTF-16 range)
- all UCS (UCS-4, UTF-8)
- there is a terminal with (some of) the
above font and rendering capabilities
...and there is certainly more that is important for developers...
hwsat?
markus
Markus Scherer IBM RTP +1 919 486 1135 Dept. Fax +1 919 254 6430
scherer@raleigh.ibm.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:42 EDT