RE: MS Windows and Unicode 4.0 ?

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Dec 02 2003 - 08:02:51 EST

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    Michael (michka) Kaplan writes:
    > I know I'll end up regretting this....

    Why do you regret it? I know that you work for Microsoft, but I don't think
    you can imply things that Microsoft has not claimed to have done in its
    systems.

    > From: "Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>
    >
    > > That far? So why isn't there correct support of UTF-16 on Windows
    > > 95OSR2, 98, 98SE and ME (notably for their FAT32 filesystem)? I can
    > > understand it for Windows 95 and 95OSR1 as they were designed before,
    > > and may be also for the 95OSR2 version despite it was published in
    > > late 1997, one year after UTF-16 was published.
    >
    > If you have programmed on Win9x for any length of time then you know the
    > answer to this and it is simply a straw man to ask why such support was
    > not done. Its the fundamental nature of what that system does and it
    > would require a rewrite to support Unicode -- in fact, it did require a
    > rewrite (called NT).

    NT4 predates Windows 95, and offered a whole set of Unicode APIs.

    You can't say that NT is a rewrite of Windows 95, as it is simply the
    reverse:

    Windows 95 was built to integrate the Win32 Unicode APIs of NT, and ease the
    compatibility of programs written for NT4 environment. That's why it
    contains the MultiByteToWideChar() and WideCharToMultiByte() functions which
    are used to convert between Unicode (in fact only UTF-16 in Windows 95) and
    other SBCS or DBCS encodings (in fact only the OEMCP and ANSICP codepages
    for the localized version of the system in Windows 95).

    Of course the kernel of Windows 95 is basically the same as Windows for
    Workgroup 3.11, including for its drivers (but Windows 95 innovated in its
    new Plug&Play architecture with simpler drivers, a technology that was later
    retrofitted in Windows 2000, or integrated after full debugging as I'm quite
    sure that it was developped to be later compatible and integrable in the NT
    kernel).

    The FAT32 filesystem (or more precisely the support of UTF-16 encoded LFN)
    was also new in Windows 95: it should have integrated approximately the same
    file naming conventions as in NT4, without needing the integration of the
    NTFS filesystem in Windows 95. Full support for FAT32 was later integrated
    in Windows 2000.

    If you want to say that NT is a rewrite, you must speak about NT 3.0 which
    was rewritten from the Windows 3.1+MSDOS 6 base (in parallel with Windows
    for WorkGroup 3.11 which was, despite its minor version number, a really
    _major_ evolution from Windows 3.1 and has been _much_ more innovative than
    Windows 95 for the kernel part as WfW already integrated support for
    multiple VMs), and to integrate kernel features found in Unix, MVS and VMS
    systems. The origin of NT is a split from the development project of OS/2
    initiated by IBM and initially written jointly between IBM and Microsoft.

    Microsoft had to rewrite all in NT when he decided to exit the OS/2 joint
    project, to leave the legacy dependance with IBM in the MSDOS kernel system
    (adapted to multitasking in OS/2 using the VM concept which was possible
    starting with the Intel 80286 processor, and experimented in some "enhanced
    multitasking DOS" systems).

    The kernel support of "wide chars" (even if it was still not named Unicode)
    was already a developement target in OS/2, and it's quite normal that it was
    also integrated in NT when "wide chars" became synonymous of UCS-2 in
    Windows NT kernel.

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