Re: Pre-proposal: unicode normalized text

On Wed, 2023-10-04 at 14:02 -0400, Chapman Flack wrote:
> The SQL standard would have me able to:
>
> CREATE TABLE foo (
>    a CHARACTER VARYING CHARACTER SET UTF8,
>    b CHARACTER VARYING CHARACTER SET LATIN1
> )
>
> and so on, and write character literals like
>
> _UTF8'Hello, world!' and _LATIN1'Hello, world!'

Is there a use case for that? UTF-8 is able to encode any unicode code
point, it's relatively compact, and it's backwards-compatible with 7-
bit ASCII. If you have a variety of text data in your system (and in
many cases even if not), then UTF-8 seems like the right solution.

Text data encoded 17 different ways requires a lot of bookkeeping in
the type system, and it also requires injecting a bunch of fallible
transcoding operators around just to compare strings.

Regards,
Jeff Davis