Unicode education in Schools

Richard Wordingham via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Sat Aug 26 10:09:33 CDT 2017


On Fri, 25 Aug 2017 09:36:00 +0300
Eli Zaretskii via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

> > Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:23:40 +0100
> > From: Richard Wordingham via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
> > 
> > On Thu, 24 Aug 2017 17:17:10 +0000
> > Andre Schappo via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> >   
> > > So, I consider it important to familiarise students with SMP
> > > characters as well as BMP characters. Then when they develop
> > > software they will, at the start, be thinking beyond ASCII and
> > > Unicode BMP characters.  
> > 
> > Just steer them away from UTF-16!  
> 
> Which will leave them entirely unprepared for the MS-Windows Unicode
> programming, something they of course will never need in their
> careers.

It shouldn't.  UTF-16 works just like UTF-8, except that the code units
are bigger.  The problem is that accidentally ignoring the difference
between UTF-16 and UCS-2 takes longer to be detected, and therefore
correcting the error may be very difficult.  Ignoring the difference
between ASCII (or an 8-bit coding) and UTF-8 shows up very quickly, and
therefore is less difficult to fix, for less is broken by the obvious
correction.

Richard.



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