[darcs-users] Default binary masks

Trevor Talbot quension at mac.com
Mon Nov 24 22:49:33 UTC 2003


On Saturday, Nov 22, 2003, at 14:59 US/Pacific, Sean E. Russell wrote:

> On Saturday 22 November 2003 15:42, Marnix Klooster wrote:
>> This triggers something else: what about Unicode?  Microsoft Visual 
>> Studio tools tend to use Unicode configuration files (I think UTF-16)
>
> I know this is a little off-topic, but WTF?  Why would they choose 
> UTF-16?

UTF-16 is the most balanced of the Unicode formats to deal with.  
Multi-codepoint encodings are rare compared to UTF-8, and there is only 
one surrogate encoding length to deal with, but it doesn't have the 
wasteful memory usage of UTF-32.

It's also NT's native format.  Most non-trivial Unicode APIs on other 
platforms seem to use UTF-16 as well.





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