From: Arcane Jill (arcanejill@ramonsky.com)
Date: Mon Dec 06 2004 - 02:39:24 CST
Probably a dumb question, but how come nobody's invented "UTF-24" yet? I
just made that up, it's not an official standard, but one could easily
define UTF-24 as UTF-32 with the most-significant byte (which is always
zero) removed, hence all characters are stored in exactly three bytes and
all are treated equally. You could have UTF-24LE and UTF-24BE variants, and
even UTF-24 BOMs. Of course, I'm not suggesting this is a particularly
brilliant idea, but I just wonder why no-one's suggested it before.
(And then of course, there's UTF-21, in which blocks of 21 bits are
concatenated, so that eight Unicode characters will be stored in every 21
bytes - and not to mention UTF-20.087462841250343, in which a plain text
document is simply regarded as one very large integer expressed in radix
1114112, and whose UTF-20.087462841250343 representation is simply that
number expressed in binary. But now I'm getting /very/ silly - please don't
take any of this seriously.) :-)
The "UTF-24" thing seems a reasonably sensible question though. Is it just
that we don't like it because some processors have alignment restrictions or
something?
Arcane Jill
-----Original Message-----
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
Behalf Of Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk
Sent: 02 December 2004 16:59
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: Nicest UTF
"Arcane Jill" <arcanejill@ramonsky.com> writes:
> Oh for a chip with 21-bit wide registers!
Not 21-bit but 20.087462841250343-bit :-)
--
__("< Marcin Kowalczyk
\__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl
^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/
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