Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?

On 29/04/2025 12:17, Muttley@DastardlyHQ.org wrote:

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:58:46 +0200
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wibbled:

On 29/04/2025 01:13, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

Oh, so it's a multi-word encoding (like UTF-8 is a multi-byte encoding)
and a character not necessarily encoded with only one 16 bit word... -
...but then I wonder even more where you see an advantage.
>

>
When Unicode started, they thought 16 bits would be enough.  UCS2 made

 They only had to check how many chinese pictograms there are to realise
that it was never going to be enough. Perhaps chinese wasn't considered
important back then.
 

I am sure it was considered important - but it might have been considered too ambitious to include CJK languages in Unicode in the early days.  Still, I agree they could have looked a little deeper into their crystal ball before deciding that 64K characters were enough for everyone.