[Info-vax] Coding style in the VMS's

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Friday, October 1, 2021 at 5:54:43 AM UTC+13, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>
> And most platforms ten to use UTF-16 internally (memory)  ...

UTF-16 was a face-saving compatibility hack which nobody voluntarily uses. It dates from the first versions of Unicode, when the standards committee assured everybody that, to paraphrase, “16 bits ought to be enough for anybody!”, that Unicode was UCS-2, now and for the future. And certain companies -- Sun with Java, Microsoft with Windows NT, Apple with HFS-Plus -- took them at their word.

Then a few years later the Unicode people changed their minds, and decided we weren’t just going to represent writing scripts in current use, but all the historical ones as well, so we needed something more like 20 bits (for now). And so the “surrogates” blocks were allocated, and what was originally UCS-2 was now redefined as UTF-16, to allow those abovementioned systems to be hacked to deal with the new reality.