From: Doug Ewell (dewell@roadrunner.com)
Date: Wed May 28 2008 - 22:17:31 CDT
Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
> Saying that any encoding scheme or form is stateless is completely
> false: all you can say is that some representation require *less* free
> state variables than others, but you absolutely cannot exclude *all*
> state variables.
The way it was explained to me was that with UTF-8 and company, you only
have to maintain state for a short, fixed number of bytes, whereas with
something like ISO 2022 or SCSU you have to maintain state for an
arbitrary amount of data, possibly gigabytes.
While I haven't bought into every piece of Unicode received wisdom I've
heard, this definition of "stateless" makes perfect sense to me and I no
longer think of UTF-(8n) as stateful.
-- Doug Ewell * Arvada, Colorado, USA * RFC 4645 * UTN #14 http://www.ewellic.org http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages ˆ
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