3 ms·

Ugh i forgot about Windows. Windows used UCS-2 some decades ago, from there, UCS-2 got standardized into MEFI FAT and that document got incorporated into the EF

• mananaysiempre 3y ago
  There’s more fun stuff like that: because Microsoft wrote the spec for the Language Server Protocol, the offsets in it are in UTF-16 code units even though the transport format is UTF-8. (This is less awful than it sounds, because a code point takes two UTF-16 code units iff it takes the maximum allowed four UTF-8 ones, i.e. if its UTF-8 starts with ≥ 0xF0. But it’s still pretty awful.) And of course UCS-2 had also been baked into Java and Java/ECMAScript at about the same time (circa 1990) and only afterwards was it half-brokenly extended to UTF-16. In defense of all those usages (except the LSP one, which is indefensible), the original pitches for Unicode[1] literally said that it was intended to be fixed-width, an international ASCII of sorts; that was to be achieved by restricting it to “commercially-relevant” text (and Han unification). Then it turned out there are plenty of very rare Han characters people really, really want to see encoded (for place and personal names, etc.). Of course, in hindsight an encoding with nontrivial string equivalences (e.g. combining diacritics) was never going to be as simple to handle as ASCII. [1] https://unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf https://unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf