NARS2000 - User contributions [en]

Talk:Unicode

2009-03-20T22:24:57Z

Miquel:

== Character Array and Name Storage ==

It is true that "UCS-2 represents characters from U+0000 through U+FFFF; UTF-16 represents characters from U+0000 through U+10FFFF" but only UCS-2 excludes the ''surrogate pair range'' of U+D800 through U+DFFF (2,048 characters). UTF-16 uses precisely these surrogate pairs to represent the characters outside the ''Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)''.

It's a bit reductive to say that "UTF-16 is needed mostly for Far Eastern languages" in the sense that the BMP contains the basic characters for Far Eastern languages. The other planes are concerned with anciant scripts (egyptian hyeroglyphs, phoenician, cuneiform but also western and byzantine music and ''extensions'' of chinese characters).

== Alphabet for Names ==

Historically, the first implementation of APL used a ''Selectric'' typeball as input device. There was only one form of alphabet made of the uppercase letters [A-Z]. I do'nt remember exactly who had the idea of underlining the letters (perhaps Adin Falkoff) but the intention was clearly to have an ''emphatic'' set of characters in opposite of the standard one.

Then, in my humble opinion, the mapping is '''non-emphatic/lowercase''' and '''emphatic/uppercase''' because uppercase letters seems stronger than lowercase ones.

Talk:Unicode

2009-03-20T19:05:37Z

Miquel:

Talk:Unicode

2009-03-20T19:01:17Z

Miquel: New page: It is true that "UCS-2 represents characters from U+0000 through U+FFFF; UTF-16 represents characters from U+0000 through U+10FFFF" but only UCS-2 excludes the ''surrogate pair range'' of ...

It is true that "UCS-2 represents characters from U+0000 through U+FFFF; UTF-16 represents characters from U+0000 through U+10FFFF" but only UCS-2 excludes the ''surrogate pair range'' of U+D800 through U+DFFF (2,048 characters). UTF-16 uses precisely these surrogate pairs to represent the characters outside the ''Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)''.

It's a bit reductive to say that "UTF-16 is needed mostly for Far Eastern languages" in the sense that the BMP contains the basic characters for Far Eastern languages. The other planes are concerned with anciant scripts (egyptian hyeroglyphs, phoenician, cuneiform but also western and byzantine music and ''extensions'' of chinese characters).