| Re: Unicode support [message #180976 is a reply to message #180857] |
Sat, 30 March 2013 12:57   |
Christoph Becker
Messages: 91
Registered: June 2012
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Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
>
> Christoph Becker wrote:
>
>> Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
>>>> Am 21.03.2013 15:31, schrieb Adrian Tuddenham:
>>>> > There are some computers that cannot read UTF-8.
>>>
>>> That would be computers and software older than 30 years now. The
>>> Unicode Standard, version 2.0, and UTF-8, one the encodings for the
>>> character set thus specified, was published in 1992 CE. All reasonably
>>> modern operating systems, in effect all commonly used ones, support
>>> Unicode and provide Unicode-capable fonts. Many have made a Unicode
>>> encoding their default encoding; for example, NTFS encodes filenames
>>> using UTF-16, and UTF-8 has been the default locale encoding on GNU/Linux
>>> systems for several years now.
>>
>> I recently read, that UTF-8 is not available on many Windows PCs in
>> Taiwan, where `BIG5' is still prevalent, what would be very unfortunate.
>
> I would like to see proof of that. While possible, I consider it unlikely.
> Taiwan is especially intertwined with the Western world (being the location
> of major local hardware manufacturers, and major foreign investments on the
> doorstep to mainland China), and Traditional Chinese as written in Taiwan
> was one of the first scripts to be covered by Unicode, with CJK Unified
> Ideographs, in 1992.
I'm quite sure now, that I was mistaken. It is not UTF-8 support that
is missing on the PCs, but rather that the file systems are using BIG5
by default, what is of course something quite different. Sorry for the
incorrect information.
> Windows has been supporting Unicode, and came pre-installed with Unicode-
> capable fonts since Windows NT (and so, Windows 2000). Did not Windows XP
> support end last year?
According to <http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/endofsupport.aspx>
support of Windows XP SP3 ends on April 8, 2014.
>> OTOH restricting oneself to ASCII on Usenet reminds me of offering full
>> support for IE 6 on the Web (e.g. by using GIFs instead PNGs when
>> transparency is required), which IMO holds back reasonable innovation.
>
> ACK.
>
>>> Thus, a major criticism of PHP is that as of version 5.4 it still has no
>>> native Unicode support, while other popular programming languages on the
>>> Web, like ECMAScript implementations and Python, have.
>>
>> Indeed, that's a shame and rather painful for developers. And if I'm
>> not mistaken, the situation won't change with PHP 5.5. :(
>
> That would be a pity. Native Unicode support was announced for PHP 6 before
> those plans were abandoned. I wonder, what can be that hard in implementing
> it? Apparently even Perl managed the transition years ago although it
> requires a few extra lines per script.
Native Unicode support was planned to be resp. already partially
implemented by using UTF-16 internally throughout. It seems, that
several PHP developers had concerns about the performance and memory
overhead of doing so. Obviously no agreement could be found, and on
March 11, 2010 Rasmus Lerdorf `decided' to delay PHP 6 and the Unicode
support.[1]
Of course there are several extensions handling UTF-8 quite well, but
these may not be available on shared web hosting services, and anyway
it's quite ugly to have e.g. strlen('€')===3 when dealing with UTF-8.
[1] <http://news.php.net/php.internals/47120>
--
Christoph M. Becker
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