Re: Byte Addressability And Beyond

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

The fixed-size things are references to objects. Or in a lower-level
language like C, they could indeed be pointers/indexes into an array of
code points.

There is no need for UTF-32 for such an approach.  Just let the
pointers/indexes point to the start of the character in UTF-8
represntation.

[...] we still have easy random access, and the length of the
array is the number of characters.

Both of which are rarely necessary.

But sure, if you need that, the approach of having an array of
pointers to characters in UTF-8 representation works, while converting
to UTF-32 does not help at all.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>