Re: ixampl goes Unicode

 > And then yesterday, I had a brainwave. There are only 256 bytes. 128 of 
them are ASCII, and they just represent themselves (that's the reason UTF-8 
exists).
 >
 > Of the other non-ASCII characters, they all play a single role in any 
UTF-8 string:
 >
 > [#C0-#DF] are leading bytes of a 2 byte character
 > [#E0-#EF] are leading bytes of a 3 byte character
 > [#F0-#F7] are leading bytes of a 4 byte character.
 > [#80-#BF] are continuation bytes of the multibyte characters,
 > and [#F8-#FF] are illegal.


I realised under the shower this morning that this means that Unicode is 
context-free. Using a byte-oriented input stream, you can describe Unicode 
as:
 unicode: char*.
 char: ascii; 
       h2, c;
       h3, c, c.
       h4, c, c, c.
 ascii: [#0-#7f].
 h2: [#c0-#df].
 h3: [#e0-#ef].
 h4: [#f0-#f7].
 c:  [#80-#bf].
Steven