Timeline for Should UTF-16 be considered harmful?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 13, 2015 at 16:25 | history | unlocked | Thomas Owens♦ | ||
| Aug 13, 2015 at 16:05 | history | locked | CommunityBot | ||
| May 1, 2012 at 0:05 | comment | added | Qwertie | C# has a different excuse: it was designed for Windows, and Windows was built on UCS-2 (it's very annoying that even today Windows APIs cannot support UTF-8). Plus, I think Microsoft wanted Java compatibility (.NET 1.0 had a Java compatibility library, but they dropped Java support very quickly--I'm guessing this is due to Sun's lawsuit against MS?) | |
| Aug 18, 2011 at 23:06 | comment | added | dan04 | And I've seen a lot of C code that doesn't handle character encoding correctly. | |
| Aug 18, 2011 at 21:32 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki | ||
| Jun 6, 2011 at 15:53 | comment | added | JAB | This answer is almost two years old, but I can't help but comment on it. "Having a type named 'char' which does not always represent a character is pretty confusing." And yet people use it all the time in C and the like to represent integer data that can be stored in a single byte. | |
| Apr 2, 2010 at 13:43 | comment | added | Joey | @Kathy: Not really an excuse for C#, though. Generally, I agree, that there should be a CodePoint type, holding a single code point (21 bits), a CodeUnit type, holding a single code unit (16 bits for UTF-16) and a Character type would ideally have to support a complete grapheme. But that makes it functionally equivalent to a String ... | |
| Jun 26, 2009 at 17:40 | comment | added | Kathy Van Stone | In Java's case, if you look at their timeline (java.com/en/javahistory/timeline.jsp), you see that the primarily development of String happened while Unicode was 16 bits (it changed in 1996). They had to bolt on the ability to handle non BMP code points, thus the confusion. | |
| Jun 26, 2009 at 16:14 | history | answered | JacquesB | CC BY-SA 2.5 |