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Postings from June 2001
Russ Allbery writes: : Yeah, but one of the guarantees of UTF-8 is: : : - The octet values FE and FF never appear. : : I can see that this property may not be that important, but it makes me : feel like things that don't have this property aren't really UTF-8. Which is one of the reasons I call it "utf8" instead. I think of utf8 as a nice way to compactly store a sequence of arbitrarily sized integers. And you know I've never been particularly interested in having Perl enforce arbitrary limits. (Admittedly, in the particular case of integer size, Perl has historically accepted some arbitrary 2**n limits to gain performance.) I'm much more interested in the clean abstraction of "a string is a sequence of integers" than I am in the fact that those integers happen to represent particular characters under Unicode. To be sure, it's quite handy that those integers do represent characters, but (as has been pointed out redundantly and repetitiously) the definition of Unicode changes over time. In contrast, the definition of integers doesn't change. (At least, it hadn't changed last time I checked...) LarryThread Previous | Thread Next