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Re: Specifying a Unicode subset

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Specifying a Unicode subset
• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2002 14:46:24 -0700
• In-reply-to: <AF104122-E511-11D6-BFB3-0030657E2F34@m...>
• References: <AF104122-E511-11D6-BFB3-0030657E2F34@m...> <200210211640.MAA28778@m...> <20021022173710.E12115@r...> <3DB5E10F.2010507@p...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021016

Paul Prescod wrote:

> The costs and benefits of UTF-8 are well-known. Random-access at the
> character level becomes quite inefficient. Neither UCS-2 nor UTF-8 are
> right as the in-memory model for all applications.

I find that I use UTF-8 more & more even for internal processing.  I 
suspect that some of the shock & horror I first felt upon encountering 
this severe bit-munging lives on somewhere in the Web to be thrown in my 
face at some future point.

Seems weird, but I just *never* seem to need direct indexing into 
character buffers any more.  I seem to remember that I used to do this a 
lot... don't know what changed.  Also, the notion of building a 
fast-searchable page table for enabling quick lookup of variable-size 
whatevers has become an awfully common idiom, not constant time but 
o(log(N)) is pretty damn good in RAM.

I'm out of touch with academe... I wonder if the focus of data 
structures courses has changed as the price of RAM storage 
asymptotically approaches zero. -Tim

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: tblanchard@m...
  • Re: Specifying a Unicode subset
    • From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
  • Re: Specifying a Unicode subset
    • From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@r...>
  • Re: Specifying a Unicode subset
    • From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>

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