RE: Java/Unicode brain damage

[Benjamin Franz <snowhare@nihongo.org>]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2001, Miles Sabin wrote:

> I wrote,
> > Duane Nickull wrote,
> > > Is anyone aware of Sun or MS working on classes to rectify this?
> >
> > Umm ... _yes_, as I said before.
> 
> I'll try reading the question next time. I'm not aware of anyone at
> Sun working on classes directly representing Unicode characters
> rather than UTF-16 units.

I'm being dense today. When you say 'UTF-16 units' do you mean that in
Java a single character in the surrogate ranges may consist of (correctly
IMHO) a _complete_ 32-bit surrogate pair or (dain bramagedly) of the
individual 'halfs' of the pair (thus making a single character into two
individual 'units' of 16-bits each)? If the latter, the Java's handling of
Unicode is broken-as-designed and must be fixed (most likely via
deprecation of the existing String in favor of a completely new string
type for the sake of backwards compatibility with already deployed apps).

-- 
Benjamin Franz

  Programs must be written for people to read, and only 
  incidentally for machines to execute.
                             ---Abelson and Sussman