From: Mike Ayers (mike.ayers@tumbleweed.com)
Date: Fri Jan 07 2005 - 13:05:02 CST
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org
> [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of Arcane Jill
> Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 1:44 AM
> All sounds a bit pedantic to me.
A bit?
> Surely /no/ applications
> "represent" LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE as
> U+00E1, if by "represent" you mean export the representation to the
> U+outside
^
|
spurious, yes?
> world. (The internal representation of Unicode characters
> within an application is private and opaque, and sometimes
> not even known to the programmer if they use a library which
> abstracts the concept).
Correct.
> Instead, Unicode defines LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE as
> U+00E1, and applications export U+00E1 as either <0xC3 0x91>
> (UTF-8), <0x00E1> (UTF-16), <0x000000E1> (UTF-32) ... or
> <0xA8 0xA2> (GB18030). In which case, surely GB18030 is an
> encoding form of Unicode, just like the UTFs.
>
> No?
No. First, although applications may export UTFs, if they are using
those UTFs to carry Unicode character codes, then they are in fact
*representing* LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE as U+00e1, even though the
codepoints may not be obvious by looking at the byte stream (think of
encryption, which does not change text, but transforms it into a highly
nontrivial encoding form. The "U+" notation refers to the codepoints, not
the bytes used to transmit them.
Second, and more importantly, since GB18030 does not encode all of
Unicode, it cannot be considered a Unicode encoding form.
/|/|ike
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