Re: FYI: Some links about UTF-16

[Beni Cherniavsky <cben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Pablo Saratxaga wrote on 2003-07-08:

> What is somewhat funny is that long discussions are held about
> that worst case 50% increase in size; yet at the same time the typical
> use of a hard disk is mostly about huge non-text data (sound, video,
> images, games, fonts,...)
>
> I can store all the textual information of the web pages I work at
> in less than 5% of a CDROM. I can fill it with some of the images and
> sound files I have; and I'm not a multimedia freak.
>
A good point.  I can add that most of the documents on my computer are
the ones that came with the system/programs I use so ASCII is still
the predominant component of the non-binray files on my HD.  No,
English is not my native langauge and I guess the situation is similar
for most Western users.  Even for Asian users it would probably take
non-trivial effort to exceed the amount of ASCII in a typical linux
installation.

The main point of the size argument is not HD size however - it's
cache usage and processor/memory bandwidth which translater to speed
of text processing.  Not that I find that a convincing argument, I
find it hard to imagine a text-intensive application whose performance
is critical enough, except for parsers - but most syntaxes out there
are still ASCII ;-).

-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

If I don't hack on it, who will?  And if I don't GPL it, what am I?
And if it itches, why not now?  [With apologies to Hilel ;]
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/