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Re:UCS vs. UTF-8 as Internal String Encoding by TheCoelacanth on Thursday May 28, 2015 @10:30PM (#9622389)
It only has to be an abstract class if you want to prevent the existence of invalid offsets, but the same is true if you have constant width code points. For instance, INT_MAX is not a valid offset into almost any string.
Re:UCS vs. UTF-8 as Internal String Encoding by lisper on Friday May 29, 2015 @02:14AM (#9622998)
> It only has to be an abstract class if you want to prevent the existence of invalid offsets

Wouldn't you want that? I would.

> the same is true if you have constant width code points

True, but the validity check for the constant-width case can be done in constant time.

Re:UCS vs. UTF-8 as Internal String Encoding by TheCoelacanth on Friday May 29, 2015 @09:25AM (#9624351)
> True, but the validity check for the constant-width case can be done in constant time.

The same is true of UTF-8 because it is self-synchronizing. You only have to check that the byte at the given offset is either 0xxxxxxx or 11xxxxxx.

Re:UCS vs. UTF-8 as Internal String Encoding by lisper on Friday May 29, 2015 @11:06AM (#9624978)
Hm, that's a good point.