Re: Misuse of 8th bit [Was: My Querry]

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Fri Nov 26 2004 - 21:04:05 CST

  • Next message: Doug Ewell: "Re: Misuse of 8th bit [Was: My Querry]"

    Antoine Leca scripsit:

    > In a similar vein, I cannot be in agreement that it could be advisable to
    > use the 22th, 23th, 32th, 63th, etc., the upper bits of the storage of a
    > Unicode codepoint. Right now, nobody is seeing any use for them as part of
    > characters, but history should have learned us we should prevent this kind
    > of optimisations to occur.

    No, I don't agree with this part. Unicode just isn't going to expand
    past 0x10FFFF unless Earth joins the Galactic Empire. So the upper bits
    are indeed free for private uses.

    > Particularly when it is NOT defined by the
    > standards: such a situation leads everybody and his dog to find his
    > particular "optimum" use for these "free space", and these classes of
    > optimums do not generally collides between them...

    I don't think this matters as long as the upper bits are not used in
    interchange. For example, it would be reasonable to represent Unicode
    characters as immediates on a virtual machine by using some pattern in
    the upper bits that flags them as characters.

    -- 
    Eric Raymond is the Margaret Mead               John Cowan
    of the Open Source movement.                    jcowan@reutershealth.com
            --Bruce Perens,                         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
              some years ago                        http://www.reutershealth.com
    


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