Design Intelligence

Case

Pike and Thompson on adopting UTF over 16-bit Unicode representation in Plan 9:

Unicode defines an adequate character set but an unreasonable representation. The Unicode standard states that all characters are 16 bits wide and are communicated in 16-bit units.... To adopt Unicode, we would have had to convert all text going into and out of Plan 9 between ASCII and Unicode, which cannot be done. Within a single program, in command of all its input and output, it is possible to define characters as 16-bit quantities; in the context of a networked system with hundreds of applications on diverse machines by different manufacturers, it is impossible.


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The UTF encoding has several good properties. By far the most important is that a byte in the ASCII range 0-127 represents itself in UTF. Thus UTF is backward compatible with ASCII.