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From:	"Gary R. Van Sickle" <g DOT r DOT vansickle AT worldnet DOT att DOT net>
To:	"'Colin JN Breame'" <colinb AT chameleonnet DOT co DOT uk>, <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject:	RE: OT: RE: filesystem encoding
Date:	Fri, 10 Sep 2004 22:36:16 -0500
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In-Reply-To:	<41416CE6.3080005@chameleonnet.co.uk>
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> Gary R. Van Sickle wrote:
> 
> >Welcome to the 21st century, where computers can't even 
> unambiguously 
> >represent written text.
> >  
> >
> Isn't this something unicode was meant to solve?

Yes, and if implemented properly, it mostly does.

> or does 
> unicode still need a codepage to map to glyphs?

No, not a system-wide one anyway.  IIRC (and I'm no Unicode expert), the
verbage in the specs talk about "codepages" (or something like that) a lot,
but it's a few bits in each character that specify something similar to the
ASCII/ISO-style codepages, the end result being that each individual Unicode
character is unambiguously represented[1].

-- 
Gary R. Van Sickle
 
[1] Gross oversimplification alert.  Some of the Asian languages have
characters who's precise glyph depends on the previous character, and I
think that introduces some context sensitivity.  Ah well, we have to leave
*something* for the 31st century folks to fix. :-(.


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