> -----Original Message-----
> From: peter_jacobi.rm [mailto:peter_jacobi@...]
> Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 11:54 PM
> To: Firebird-Architect@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [Firebird-Architect] Re: UTF-8 vs UTF-16
>
>
> Hi Dave, All,
>
> In Firebird-Architect@yahoogroups.com, "David Schnepper" wrote:
> [...]
> > At the time (1992) I implemented Unicode-FSS (which
> > was later known as FSS-UTF). There were other encoding
> > proposals floating around, but I liked FSS as
> > a) No embedded 0 bytes, except for real EOS.
> > b) Anything that "looked like" a file system
> > character ( : / . a-z, etc) really was a file system
> > character.
>
> Thank you for the historic background! I was just
> curious whether there are some minor differences
> between FSS and UTF-8, because one of the few links
> I found, stated that originally they were competing
> proposals. It seems that author is in error.

Actually, there was a different UTF-8 proposal
floating around at the time - which, if memory
served, was a BE byte stream with only
a couple bytes remapped (0 byte being one of them).
It was space efficient, but had more state
requirements in parsing - and wouldn't be good
going through anything that wasn't unicode
aware. You can pass a UTF8 stream through
many functions (strcpy, file.open(), file.create(),
etc) without things blowing up.

That proposal died young, and I guess FSS took
over the name.

>
> Enumerating the plusses of UTF-8 as compared with
> some other multi byte encodings would add:
>
> 1. Can start at the end of the string (or even
> in the middle) with decoding into characters.
>
> 2. Doing an ASCII uppercase on the UTF-8 bytes gives
> an ASCII uppercase of the encoded characters.
>
> 3. You can look for substrings on the byte stream
> level instead of having to use temporary wide
> character strings.
>
> Regards,
> Peter Jacobi
>
>
> >
> > I agree that noone else picked up on the name UNICODE_FSS - I made
> it up and
> > noone else agreed with my wisdom. <grin>
> >
> > Dave
>
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