3 ms·
> But the thing is that in 20-30 years we won't be able to invent any new writing systems that UTF-8 won't cover. I think you underestimate humanity's aptitude
by Tiksi 11y ago
> But the thing is that in 20-30 years we won't be able to invent any new writing systems that UTF-8 won't cover.
I think you underestimate humanity's aptitude at creating things that don't fit into well defined standards.
My (admittedly poorly stated) point wasn't that we shouldn't be moving everything over to UTF-8. I personally use it wherever possible just because it makes life easier. My point was that there are decades of things that use ASCII-US or another one of the overlapping but incompatible encodings because they were the RightThing™ to use at the time and there's no way we're going to get rid of everything non-UTF-8 any time soon.
In 20-30 years we'll be saying "Why isn't everything in FutureText-64, it should be the only encoding. Why does anything else even exist?", and it'll be because we're saying the same about UTF-8 now.
- plugnburn 11y agoI think you miss the point. When CP1251, KOI8-R and other crazy imcompatible things came around, they came around because there was a need: ASCII didn't provide a necessary character set. Now when we have Unicode that embodies virtually all character sets existing on Earth, we don't _really_ need either non-Unicode encodings, or even fixed-byte UTF versions. So a move to any hypothetical FutureText-64 will actually give no practical gain, unlike a move from single-byters to, for example, UCS-2 and then from UCS-2 to UTF-8. But my main point is another: eliminate all single-byter and fixed-byter zoo and leave one universal encoding. When (if ever) it's time to replace it, we'll do it all and at once, not having those crazy iconvs everywhere.