From: lynnmcguire5@gmail.com   
      
   On 11/22/2024 8:08 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:   
   > On Fri, 22 Nov 2024 19:40:19 -0600, Lynn McGuire wrote:   
   >   
   >> Come over here to Windows.  UTF-16 is the name of the game.  It is a   
   >> total pain.   
   >   
   > Microsoft (and Sun, with Java) adopted Unicode at precisely the wrong   
   > time, back when everybody believed the Unicode folks who said that it   
   > would remain a fixed-length 16-bit code.   
   >   
   >> Microsoft is rumored to be working on a UTF-8 API for Win32 / Win64.  I   
   >> will believe it when I see it.   
   >   
   > Linux simply ignored the issue. Filespecs passed to the kernel are split   
   > at ASCII “/” characters and terminated by NUL. And those are the only   
   byte   
   > values with special interpretations; file/directory names are free to   
   > contain anything else. As a result, it works seamlessly with UTF-8.   
      
   It was probably an economic decision on Microsoft's part with having to   
   ship different versions of DOS and Windows with English, French,   
   Russian, Chinese, Japanese, etc, etc, etc back in the 1980s.  UTF-8 came   
   out in the middle 1990s ???  I suspect that they wanted to ship just one   
   version of Windows, Office, etc and have it automatically acclimate to   
   the user's desired main language.   
      
   Several countries mandated that large software shops ship their   
   countries native language in their software.  France and Quebec were the   
   guiltiest of this.  I actually have a French version of Microsoft Office   
   95 over in my cabinet.   
      
   Lynn   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)