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RE: Java/Unicode brain damage

• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 13:35:09 -0400

At 10:14 AM -0700 7/26/01, Benjamin Franz wrote:


>I'm being dense today. When you say 'UTF-16 units' do you mean that in
>Java a single character in the surrogate ranges may consist of (correctly
>IMHO) a _complete_ 32-bit surrogate pair or (dain bramagedly) of the
>individual 'halfs' of the pair (thus making a single character into two
>individual 'units' of 16-bits each)?

The latter

>If the latter, the Java's handling of
>Unicode is broken-as-designed and must be fixed (most likely via
>deprecation of the existing String in favor of a completely new string
>type for the sake of backwards compatibility with already deployed apps).
>

It's worse. It's not just the String class. It's the char primitive data type which is much harder to change precisely because it's not a class. 

In 20-20 hindsight, there probably never should have been a char type in the first place, and all APIs should have been designed to work with String and Character objects instead. 
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer |
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|          The XML Bible, 2nd Edition (Hungry Minds, 2001)           |
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