FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT speakeasy.org>]

Steve Langasek wrote:

> The problem is that the 16-bit Unicode character space isn't large enough to
> cover all of the oriental character sets.

For some value of "all", you're probably right, Steve.  But I think it would 
carry us
pretty far.

(I'm just relying on Sybase, Microsoft, and Gnu manuals, here.  No real 
experience.)

>From what I understand, Unicode is UCS-2 and is 16-bit.  It can be converted 
>to
UTF-8, a multibyte counted-string system (no null terminators).  All three 
manuals
state Unicode can represent Chinese.  (There's only one written Chinese 
language.  Is
there more than one "character set"?)

Sybase:     "In UCS-2 all characters; ASCII, Latin-based characters, and Asian
ideographs; are encoded as 2-byte, 16-bit characters."

Gnu:     "Unicode was originally planned as a 16-bit character set, whereas 
ISO 10646
was designed to be a 31-bit large code space. The two standards are 
practically
identical. They have the same character repertoire and code table, but Unicode
specifies added semantics."
http://www.gnu.org/manual/glibc-2.2.3/html_node/libc_85.html

There doesn't seem to be any support out there for UCS-4, unless you count 
Gnu's
32-bit wchar_t type (which they say isn't strictly compliant).  So, supporting
Unicode would put FreeTDS on par with its databases.

Interesting.  Sybase has Unicode support too, but we never hear about it.

Regards,

--jkl