[Haskell-cafe] Re: PROPOSAL: New efficient Unicode string library.

[Isaac Dupree]

Stefan O'Rear wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 11:05:38PM +0200, Johan Tibell wrote:
>>> I do not believe that anyone was seriously advocating multiple blessed
>>> encodings.  The main question is *which* encoding to bless.  99+% of
>>> text I encounter is in US-ASCII, so I would favor UTF-8.  Why is UTF-16
>>> better for me?
>> All software I write professional have to support 40 languages
>> (including CJK ones) so I would prefer UTF-16 in case I could use
>> Haskell at work some day in the future. I dunno that who uses what
>> encoding the most is good grounds to pick encoding though. Ease of
>> implementation and speed on some representative sample set of text may
>> be.
> 
> UTF-8 supports CJK languages too.  The only question is efficiency

Due to the additional complexity of handling UTF-8 -- EVEN IF the actual 
text processed happens all to be US-ASCII -- will UTF-8 perhaps be less 
efficient than UTF-16, or only as fast?

Isaac