Re: [Pan-users] Annoying ' in posts

[Zan Lynx]

On 9/23/2012 6:35 AM, Paul Crawford wrote:
> The point I was hoping to make was not to denigrate the desirability of
> a single universal character set, but about the specific idea of USC-2
> representation.
> 
> For example, it is (was?) the case that if you wanted to properly use
> multi-language support on Windows NT (and later) you had to re-write any
> application to make use of 16-bit 'wide' character strings, thus
> breaking anything written in the past that assumed byte-orientated text.
> 
> And that is a *lot* of useful stuff that we are talking about:
> libraries, applications, storage devices, file compression utilities, etc.

I think that this was actually a benefit of sorts. By forcing the use of
a completely incompatible character encoding, it forced application
developers to confront head on the fact that text is not equal to bytes.

Without this push, applications would be much more likely to have left
in pieces of code that were never tested with non-English text but
appeared to function correctly on computers in the US.