Re: improved console interface (was: Re: some console code checked in

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 11:13:47PM -0400, Gaute B Strokkenes wrote:
> Any Unicode character will fit in 21 bits, so you have plenty of bits
> left over for attirbutes of various sorts.  Furthermore, the Unicode
> standard guarantees that this will alwasy be so.

Is this also true for UCS-4?  Because that is what wchar_t is on GNU
systems.  It would be nice if you could verify that.

I feel a bit uncomfortable with overloading the wchar this way, because it
does not allow you to run iconv_t on the mapped memory, you have to copy it
first.  But it might be an option.
 
> They yucky bit is when you consider characters with width not equal to
> one.  CJK ideographs are twice as wide as Latin charactes, and
> composing characters generally occupy the same cell as the base
> character.  This breaks the model with one character per cell,
> unfortunately.

We won't support that for this very reason in the first version of the
console.  Like on GNU/Linux, we will focus on Unicode support level 1 and
normalization form C.  (Hope I got this right, I am citing these from memory
:)

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
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Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
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