Re: Case mapping of sharp s

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:40:09 +0900
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> UTF-8 doesn't really have any algorithmic string-processing advantages
> over Mule code.  Even the fact that you can compute the length of a
> character algorithmically from a UTF-8 leading byte is unimportant,
> since it's much more efficient to use a table lookup for that.  The
> big advantage of UTF-8 is that it's based on Unicode, so characters
> that never should have been distinguished in the first place don't
> have to be reidentified in Lisp.  Not to mention all of the useful
> character data and the bidi algorithm, etc.

Not that it's important, but since we are talking principles here: the
bidi algorithm has nothing to do with Unicode, let alone UTF-8.  It is
not even the best algorithm to handle bidirectional text (rumor has it
that Microsoft lobbied the consortium into the algorithm they
developed for their word processors).  Better algorithms with saner
results were available years before UAX#9 was published, and they
worked with codepoints from DOS the codepage 862 just dandy.  You
(Stephen) may recall that I presented one of them in Tsukuba 9 years
ago.