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UCS-2 seemed like a good(ish) idea at the time when Unicode's scope didn't include every possible human concept represented in icon form and UTF-8 hadn't yet be

UCS-2 seemed like a good(ish) idea at the time when Unicode's scope didn't include every possible human concept represented in icon form and UTF-8 hadn't yet been spec'd on a napkin by the first adults to bother thinking about the problem.

cryptonector 5y ago
Quite true. One of the things Windows got very wrong was UCS-2 and, later, UTF-16. So did JavaScript.
- int_19h 5y ago
  And macOS, and Java, and Qt, and ... It's almost as if it was universally seen as a good idea at the time. ~
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    Yes. I'm a bit surprised it took so long for someone to come up with something better. But if someone had tried and had come up with anything other than Rob Pike's UTF-8, we might still be sad. Sometimes you have to make mistakes before you know that's what they were.
    - p_l 5y ago
      The problem is that everyone wanted to keep simple array semantics for text, and that's not really workable with full scope of Unicode (even if you have 21-bit code points exposed, Runes, etc.)
      - cryptonector 5y ago
        On the plus side, because Unix was so ASCII-based, it couldn't easily make the jump to UCS-2/wchar_t. I suspect this was ultimately the motivation that led to UTF-8 (both, IBM's first attempt and Rob Pike's winner). Being late to the game sometimes means you're more prepared.
xiaq 5y ago
Even in 1989, it should have been clear that 16 bits were not enough to encode all of the Chinese characters, let alone encoding all the human scripts. Unicode today encodes 92,865 Chinese characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs). The only reason anybody would think of UCS-2 was a good idea was that they did not consult a single Chinese or Japanese scholar on Chinese characters.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  Nobody in 1989 expected to encode 92k Chinese characters into Unicode because none of the existing encodings were encoding 92k characters either. The most common encoding for Chinese, GB2312, only has 7k characters. I recommend reading your own link, specifically the list of sources for the first CJK block to see how many characters were included and where they were sourced from.

cryptonector 5y ago

Quite true. One of the things Windows got very wrong was UCS-2 and, later, UTF-16. So did JavaScript.

int_19h 5y ago
And macOS, and Java, and Qt, and ... It's almost as if it was universally seen as a good idea at the time. ~
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Yes. I'm a bit surprised it took so long for someone to come up with something better. But if someone had tried and had come up with anything other than Rob Pike's UTF-8, we might still be sad. Sometimes you have to make mistakes before you know that's what they were.
  - p_l 5y ago
    The problem is that everyone wanted to keep simple array semantics for text, and that's not really workable with full scope of Unicode (even if you have 21-bit code points exposed, Runes, etc.)
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      On the plus side, because Unix was so ASCII-based, it couldn't easily make the jump to UCS-2/wchar_t. I suspect this was ultimately the motivation that led to UTF-8 (both, IBM's first attempt and Rob Pike's winner). Being late to the game sometimes means you're more prepared.

xiaq 5y ago

Even in 1989, it should have been clear that 16 bits were not enough to encode all of the Chinese characters, let alone encoding all the human scripts. Unicode today encodes 92,865 Chinese characters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs). The only reason anybody would think of UCS-2 was a good idea was that they did not consult a single Chinese or Japanese scholar on Chinese characters.

Arnavion 5y ago
Nobody in 1989 expected to encode 92k Chinese characters into Unicode because none of the existing encodings were encoding 92k characters either. The most common encoding for Chinese, GB2312, only has 7k characters. I recommend reading your own link, specifically the list of sources for the first CJK block to see how many characters were included and where they were sourced from.