perl-unicode

Re: Converting string to UTF-16LE

2004-03-02 10:30:05
On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 08:55:14PM +0000, Nick Ing-Simmons wrote:
: Since you are here ;-)
: 
: Why does ñ not uppercase to Ñ ?

If I recall correctly, it's because the pumpking of the time thought
that backward compatibility was more important than consistency,
and gave the internal 8-bit representation different semantics than
the corresponding utf8 representation.  I think this was a mistake,
personally.

But looking at it another way, it can be blamed on C's toupper
function, which perhaps should have been taught to have the same
semantics as Unicode, so that 8-bit strings don't have to be upgraded
to utf8 unnecessarily.

Looking at it a third way, if I hadn't based the whole thing on utf8
in the first place, perhaps folks wouldn't have had this mental lapse
of thinking 8-bit Latin-1 strings and utf8 strings are different types.

There's lots of blame to go around.  We just need to fix it...

Larry

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