Re: [vhdl-200x] VHDL support for Unicode

I may regret this as I'm not an internationalisation guru, but there seems to be some misunderstanding in the whole discussion here.

We need to keep Unicode *representations* (ie a string as a set of code points) separate from *encodings* (ie how those strings of code point are stored in files or memory).

As fara as encodings go UTF-8 is a perfectly workable encoding (and is very widely used) - Linux and Windows can both read and write files encoded this way. And indeed should be fine for UTF16 files if they have the correct header on them... (I'm not sure how different OSs are evidence of endian problems - did Window put a non standard header on UTF16 files at some point?)

For those who are interested, there's a very readable explanation here, called "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)"
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

Cheers,
Martin
(hoping he hasn't made anything worse... :)

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Martin Thompson CEng MIET
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