[Mono-dev] [PATCHES] Bug 480178 - System.Globalization.CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory() does not handle surrogate characters appropriately.

[Miguel de Icaza]

Hello,

> MS have (or used to on 2.0) a lot of broken stuff when it comes to
> unicode/locales.
> So sometimes fixing for MS compatibility means breaking correctness.

It might be time to revisit this policy.

Currently the situation is that we kept compatibility with Microsoft as
Microsoft's work on this predated the Unicode standard.

But today we have various problems:

	* Our implementation has bugs
	* We emulated the Microsoft behavior
	* We do not quite maintain the code to match the MS behavior
	* The overhead of maintaining it is pretty high
	* We do not dedicate enough cycles or have enough cycles for 
	  keeping up documents that reflect what is required.

Additionally, with Silverlight Microsoft broke with the past, and uses
whatever the native operating system provides, so we know that Mac vs
Windows has differences in this area.

To me this seems like it is time for a change in policy: our string
collation should reflect what the rules are in Unicode as it will be
easier for us to maintain.

Miguel.