RE: _Unicode_code_page_and_?.net

Asmus Freytag <asmusf at ix dot netcom dot com> wrote:

>> A code page is not, in general,
>> the same as an encoding scheme.
>
> What is, then, the proper definition of a "code page"?

I might not be able to do better than Potter Stewart here. I think of a
code page as a deliberately targeted subset of all encodable characters,
such that different "pages" make up the whole "book." The Unicode
Glossary uses the example of MS-DOS code page 437; the concept wouldn't
apply unless other pages existed, covering different repertoires.

> Later, it was realized that in order to specify what encoding data
> were in or, for example, to specify a conversion from UTF-7 and UTF-8
> to UTF-16 (native encoding scheme) one needed some suitable ID number
> to identify the mapping. Well, extending the code page id was the most
> natural way to do that, because, on several platforms, the use of a
> numerical ID from the IBM code page registry was established practice.

I don't think the existence of numeric identifiers for Unicode encoding
schemes suffices to make them "code pages."

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA
http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­