Problems
Both specifications suffer from the problem that standard communication protocols are built around octets rather than nonets, and so it would not be possible to exchange text in these formats without further encoding or specially designed protocols. This alone would probably be sufficient reason to consider their use impractical in most cases. However, this would be less of a problem with pure bit-stream communication protocols.
Furthermore, both UTF-9 and UTF-18 have specific problems of their own. UTF-9 requires special care when searching, as a shorter sequence can be found at the end of a longer sequence. This means that it is necessary to search backwards in order to find the start of the sequence. UTF-18 cannot represent all Unicode code points (although unlike UCS-2 it can represent all the planes that currently have non-private use code point assignments) making it a bad choice for a system that may need to support new languages (or rare CJK ideographs that are added after the SIP fills up) in the future.
Read more about this topic: UTF-9 And UTF-18
Famous quotes containing the word problems:
“It’s so easy during those first few months to think that the problems will never end. You feel as if your son will never sleep through the night, will always spit up food after eating, and will never learn to smile—even though you don’t know any adults or even older children who still act this way.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down—not by solving the problem, but by deciding it’s their own damn fault.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)