3 ms·
But it’s still worse when the ugly hack was only useful for a very short time, probably wasn’t even necessary, and ruins other things by existing. UTF-16 is my
by chrismorgan 5y ago
But it’s still worse when the ugly hack was only useful for a very short time, probably wasn’t even necessary, and ruins other things by existing.
UTF-16 is my favourite to complain of: created because a few large companies had put a couple of years of heavy investment into UCS-2—which was a massive breaking change itself—and didn’t want to let that go to waste (with all the bother they’d been putting users through), even though by the time they actually made UTF-16, UTF-8 with its ASCII compatibility had been invented. And so they ruined Unicode for everyone for ever after with that accursed abomination surrogates and the distinction between code points and scalar values.
- colejohnson66 5y agoAnd now Unicode have declared themselves kneecapped to ~20 bits (1,111,998) because of it. I doubt we'll run out of space like we did with 16 bits, but never say never. The whole reason UCS-2 was used was companies saying "16 bits is enough" and then it not actually being enough. Almost every issue with Unicode is because developers made assumptions, despite Unicode themselves providing guidance saying otherwise.
- layer8 5y agoAlmost every issue with software in general is because developers made assumptions.