Hello Bj”rn,   
      
   On Wednesday June 27 2012 11:05, you wrote to Benny Pedersen:   
      
    BP>> So why anyone is pretending to need Unicode is beyond me.   
      
    BF>    One good reason is, that there can never be a mix-up anywhere   
    BF> between different character sets. The old ones are so many, that we're   
    BF> bound to get into trouble:   
      
   [ list deleted ]   
      
   And that pretty long list is far from complete.   
      
    BF>    But there can be only one UTF-8...   
      
   Actually there are three character encoding schemes for Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16   
   and UTF-32, but UTF-8 is the only one practical for sending text through a   
   communication channel. UTF-16 is often used internally. XP does. But as all   
   three variants of UTF can quicky ans easily converted into each other with a   
   simpla algortihm, there is no problem. Unlike the 8 bit ensoding schemes that   
   require a seperate translation table for each pair of encoding sets. And the   
   conversion will be incomplete.   
      
   We made a mistake in letting us be stangleholded by the "ASCII-only" rule for   
   so long. We should have revolted 20 years ago. Microsoft and IBM acknowledged   
   that ASCII was not enough for the world and they did something about it. The   
   codepage hassle was not what I'd call a flying sart, but at least they did   
   something. And with the coming of XP Microsoft saw the light and went Unicode   
   internally.   
      
   But the Fidonet community stood on the side line chanting: "ASCII only"...   
      
   Ah well, better late then never.   
      
      
   Cheers, Michiel   
      
   --- GoldED+/W32-MINGW 1.1.5-b20110320   
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