On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:06:52 -0500 Ian Emmons <iemmons@bbn.com> wrote:
This is simply not going to happen. How could MS even go about doing this in Windows? It would make very single piece of Windows software incompatible with the next version!
There is a straightforward way for Microsoft to migrate Windows to this future: If they add UTF-8 support to their narrow character interface [...] then I believe we could treat POSIX and Windows identically from an encoding point of view. Then Microsoft would be free deprecate their wide character interface over an extended period of time, if they so chose.
And if the developers at Microsoft controlled the company, this would probably already be underway, if not completed. :-) But Microsoft is controlled by management, which answers to investors, who want them to squeeze as much money out of their customers as they can. Interoperability that makes programmers able to take a Windows program and easily port it to some other OS is a very *bad* thing, from their point of view -- anything that locks people into using Windows is far preferable. Market forces might coerce them into allowing it someday, as they have coerced them to making Internet Explorer more standards-compliant, but they'll fight it tooth and nail. -- Chad Nelson Oak Circle Software, Inc. * * *