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> there were less than 64K Unicode characters. Then Unicode/UTF-8 was redefined out from under them. Unicode 2.0 introduced multiple planes, i.e. more than 655
by quink 14y ago
> there were less than 64K Unicode characters. Then Unicode/UTF-8 was redefined out from under them.
Unicode 2.0 introduced multiple planes, i.e. more than 65536 characters. That was in 1996. If that was the case, then MySQL has had more than one-and-a-half decades to introduce multiple planes and seems to have done so less than a year ago. I disagree with being 'redefined out from under them', when it was defined a year after MySQL started, at a time when it probably didn't even have Unicode support yet anyway.
- excuse-me 14y agoBut when did people really start using more than the 16bit unicode chars?
- pyre 14y agoThis is just the original argument restated. It's not a rebuttal.
- quink 14y ago> But when did people really start using more than the 16bit unicode chars? 1996. China even made it a legal requirement for computer systems in 2000, through mandating GB 18030. There's the Private Use Area if nothing else. There is NO excuse to not support anything other than the BMP. Adding support is trivial unless you have been using UTF-16 in the erroneous belief that it's two bytes long always (in which case you've really been using UCS-2).
- jeltz 14y agoInteresting to note is that MySQL was first released in 1995. Which means that only for one year of its existence were there less than 65536 characters.
- klodolph 14y agoYes, but at the time, UTF-8 could encode up to 31 bits per character using six-byte sequences. It has since been restricted to four-byte sequences at the longest.
- ars 14y ago> seems to have done so less than a year ago More than 2 years ago. March 2010.