[Mono-list] A couple of questions...

[A Rafael D Teixeira]

>Miguel de Icaza <miguel@ximian.com> wrote:

>develop wrote:
>>2. I am fairly certain that the native type for "string" in Microsoft's 
>>.NET will be UNICODE. Will this be the case with Mono or will we opt for 
>>ANSI strings to be the native "string" type?

>We could support both.  For now, we will use 16-bit encoded Unicode
>(that is what Microsoft uses).  In the future, we might want to store
>our runtime strings as UTF-8 and provide conversion operators when
>needed (for example for mobile devices).

>But in the particular case of mobile devices, it would  be good to
>have the EMCA people allow for both the current encoding and UTF-8 to
>minimize the size of executables (consider again, palm-like devices,
>where you do not have a lot of room).

In truth it´s more complex than that: the compiler/runtime should "OPTIMIZE" 
the strings, choosing for each one what is the encoding that generates the 
smallest representation, and then tagging it with which encoding it used.

For example: if you have a japanese version of a software, that uses mostly 
kanji 'characters', probably UTF-16 will have a shorter representation (2 
and 4 bytes per kanji symbol) than UTF-8 (3,4,5 and even 6 bytes per 
symbol). That holds true for any device, memory constrained or not. But in 
the same application some messages may be in English and therefore those 
will be best represented as UTF-8.

I would keep the number of choices small, just UTF-8 and UTF-16. If we 
extend the concept, probably we would end up with many encoders/decoders 
(ANSI, UTF-32, EBCDIC...) having to be in the minimal runtime, which is 
needed by small devices, increasing size but not adding enough benefits.

I´m just guessing, but I think Microsoft is using UCS-2, but probably they 
will support Unicode 3.1 via UTF-16 soon, because it's needed for 
japanese/chinese applications.

Rafael Teixeira
Brazilian Developer




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