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Niels,

I think UTF-EBCDIC is a great idea, and I think it is probably the
most elegant way to internationalize ILE applications.

However, I think you are doing a disservice by not being more careful
about terminology. Specifically, you are perpetuating incorrect ideas
about the meaning of the word "Unicode".

Now, I don't know if you are using the word in some kind of
case-sensitive way, such that "UNICODE" is not the same thing as
"Unicode". Even if you are, it's still not good use of terminology.

Unicode is NOT an encoding that is EVER implemented by ANY computer
system. And it is not meant to be.

Let's clear up what I mean by "encoding". Since virtually all the
practical computers in the world are binary machines, an encoding is a
mapping from human characters to specific bit patterns.

Unicode is NOT that.

Unicode is the name for what you could say is a mathematical concept.
At its core, it is just an ordinal list of every possible character.
It is a mapping from characters to NUMBERS. Not computer
representations of numbers. Not bit patterns that correspond to the
ones and zeros of the base-2 expression of numbers. Just numbers, like
what elementary school students understand and use every day. In
Unicode parlance, these numbers are called "code points".

UTF-8 is an *encoding*. It is one way to *implement* Unicode on
computers. UTF-8 is one scheme to map code points to specific bit
patterns.

UTF-16 and UTF-32 are also encodings that implement Unicode.

EBCDIC, Windows-1252, and ISO-8859-1 are also encodings, but they do
NOT implement Unicode.

Please, respectfully, stop using the word "Unicode" (or even
"UNICODE") to refer to any particular encoding. If you mean UTF-16,
then say UTF-16.

I'm not saying this to be pedantic. I'm saying this for a similar
reason that many people on this list are passionate about encouraging
the use of the term "IBM i" instead of "AS/400" when referring to the
current IBM midrange platform.

John Y.

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