Parrot and UTF-32

darobin on 2001-12-12T15:08:58

I was surprised to see Simon announce UTF-32 support in parrot. Not that I'm against it but if you haven't looked in the direction of UTF-32, it may suffice to tell you that it is often referred to by some as "WTF-32", and that many are suggesting that it is really the result of a failed luddite attempt to make the internet 4 times slower.

The question I'm asking is "Why?". Is it simply a "because we can thing", or does WTF-32 have hidden advantages currently seen only by a happy few ? In any case the parrot stuff looks really really exciting.

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WTF-32

ziggy on 2001-12-13T14:43:32

The only advantage I can see with WTF-32 is that character counting becomes much simpler. No more scanning to correctly handle multibyte (or multiword) seqences somewhere in the string.

Probably a pre-requisite to processing Kingon, Sumerian or something.

Re: WTF-32

darobin on 2001-12-13T15:41:59

Ah yes indeed, that's one thing I hadn't thought about that does make UTF-32 interesting, thanks for the thinking.

In fact I'm now surprised people don't use it more in situations where it might provide substantial gains in speed, albeit trading that for a loss of space (but space is cheap these days).