On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 1:42 PM, Milan Babuskov <milanb@...> wrote:

> Douglas Tosi wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Milan Babuskov <milanb@...>
>> wrote:
>>> josef_gschwendtner wrote:
>>>> German characters mostly have ASCII < 7F. With UTF8 these characters
>>>> have the same storage size as in WIN1252, right?
>>> Only when represented in UTF8 form. However, Firebird internally
>>> represents them as 4-bytes-per-character internally.
>>
>> That is odd.
>> What is the point of having UTF8 as an option if internally it uses
>> the same space as Unicode? Am I missing something?
>
> Answer these and you'll have your answer:
>
> What's the point in having ASCII when it uses the same space as WIN1252?
> What's the point in having WIN1252 when it uses the same space as
> ISO-8859-1?
> Character sets don't exist because they use different space.

Not the same thing.
AFAIR the only difference between UTF8 and Unicode is the size.
If Firebird uses the same space to store each of them, I don't see the
point in having both.

--
Douglas Tosi
www.sinatica.com