Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy Subject: Re: iconv "versions" Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2024 23:02:03 -0000 (UTC) Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 16 Message-ID: References: <17bd9b0ad59ed32a$2$1588242$802601b3@news.usenetexpress.com> <65f7665a$0$5266$426a74cc@news.free.fr> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2024 23:02:03 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="1caa94953308d6b372e5a50b12554bf8"; logging-data="3976945"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX19Q3uQsgZ/t3liMoSEv4fAY" User-Agent: Pan/0.155 (Kherson; fc5a80b8) Cancel-Lock: sha1:P7nfYY3EuCz0LZ9ynJGfMuEtCLc= Bytes: 1892 On Sun, 17 Mar 2024 15:12:15 -0700 (Seattle), Relf wrote: > Microsoft was using UTF-8 back in 1989, as I recall. A little bit difficult, considering it wasn’t created until 1992 . What Microsoft was using was the original “UCS-2” (16-bit) Unicode, which the Unicode Consortium had led everyone to believe would remain a fixed- length code forever. Then they decided that, on second thoughts, they would allow up to 20- something bits (“UCS-4”), so the original 16-bit code became that monstrosity known as “UTF-16”. Which Windows and Java (and maybe one or two other things that adopted Unicode at just the wrong time) have been saddled with ever since.