3/8/2007
4:00pm-5:00pm
ECCR 265
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Unicode: Take Five
Bruce K. Haddon
Paladin Software International
The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0, was released November, 2006. This character
encoding, promoted as the universal character code, supplanting ASCII as the
character representation for many applications, including the Java and C#
programming languages, HTML/XML, Microsoft Windows 2000/CE/XP, MAC OS, etc.,
now has over 15 years of evolution and history. This newest version comes in
the wake of new challenges in the areas of mathematical notation, programming
languages, and processing algorithms, most notably string comparison.
The concept of a "universal character set" brings into focus complex (but
fascinating) problems of human written communication, requiring different
approaches to encoding problems from those of the last 40+ years (since the
definition of ASCII and EBCDIC). The talk updates previous information, and
will cover briefly the history of Unicode, demonstrate more recent changes in
approach, outline some of the above problems, and indicate solutions. Research
is invited into the remaining problems.
Dr. Bruce K. Haddon is an Australian who came to the US
and graduated with his PhD from CU in 1979, was a member of the CU CS/EE
faculty 1980-1982, and an adjoint Associate Professor with EECE 1982-1987.
He is President of Paladin Software International, Inc., and a Principal
Engineer with Sun Microsystems, Inc. His interests are operating systems,
programming languages, large-scale systems architecture, software engineering,
and in particular, software internationalization in all of the above areas.
Co-sponsored by the Front Range UNIX Users Group (FRUUG).
Haddon has provided his slides.
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