FreeTDS Development Group

["Mark H. Wood" <mwood AT IUPUI.Edu>]

On Fri, 8 Jun 2001, James K. Lowden wrote:
> Steve Langasek wrote:
[apparently quoting someone else]
> >From what I understand, Unicode is UCS-2 and is 16-bit.

}mode pedantic{
Not quite.  Rather, UCS-2 is one concrete representation of Unicode.  If I
understand the situation, Unicode is a mapping between characters and
numbers (as abstract objects) *plus* UCS-2, UCS-4, UTF-8, etc. which are
mappings from those abstract numbers to binary representations that can be
realized in hardware.

>                                                           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"?)

I'll defer to Chinese speakers the question of how many written Chinese
languages there are.  There are two Chinese character sets commonly found
in Western software these days:  "traditional" and "simplified".  And
there are two other widely-known languages using forms of the Han
characters:  Japanese and Korean.  Japanese seems to have at least one
"simplified" form as well, although I have not heard it explained that
way.  IIRC all of these are considered distinct scripts, and maintained
separately in Unicode/IS10646.

(But I'm neither a Unicode expert nor literate in Oriental languages, so
do check out these assertions.  For example, http://www.unicode.org/ .)

-- 
Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer   mwood AT IUPUI.Edu
Make a good day.