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Re: Java/Unicode brain damage

• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 13:40:23 -0400

At 8:45 AM -0700 7/26/01, David Brownell wrote:

>Nah, people complain enough about wasted space ... admittedly
>there's a religous war on whether (in C terms) "wchar_t" should
>be 16 bits or 32.
>

Developers do waste time optimizing for space, I'll grant you, but nowadays people rarely complain because space optimization doesn't really matter anymore, certainly not for text. (Video, audio, and so forth is another issue, but not one that's relevant here.) Modern applications are incredibly profligate with memory, and for the most part nobody notices or cares. Memory and disk space is so cheap today, that the extra two bytes per character is insignificant.

For transmission and serialization, you can just use UTF-8, which would be identical to current usage as long as only BMP characters were used, and a tad more efficient than current practice for non-BMP characters.
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