Subject: UCS Support "in the pipeline"

From: [email-masked]
Date: 11 Oct 94 14:57:00 -0500

----------
Re:
|Gordon Gallacher asks:
|>I'm trying to find out if there are any products now available, or in
|>pipeline, which will support Unicode/ISO 10646.

To complement the information I gave concerning AIX 4.1 UCS enabling on the
ISO10646 list, IBM announced this afternoon (statement of direction) at the
G.U.I.D.E.  SHARE europe joint conference in Vienna:

-Direct support of UCS-2 in OS/2 (next release after the one now in beta test),
 with programming interfaces and network interoperability using UCS-2 encoding;
 subsequent releases will support full level 3 conformance; intent to provide
 system API support for UCS-2 cultural formatting and sorting support; extended
 APIs to support XPG4 locales;

-OS/400 3.1 offers UCS-2 level 1 (intention for level 3) for file and path
 naming through Integrated File System (IFS); DB2/400 to support UCS level-2;
 network interoperability using UCS-2 encoding; CDRA and XPG4-based services;

-MVS (through MVS Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem [DFSMS] version 1):
 intent to support network interoperability using UCS-2 level 1 encoding;
 CDRA programming interface for character data conversion; XPG4-based
 internationalization services through AD/Cycle C/370 Langauge Support feature.

-AIX 4.1: UCS-2 at the level of input method, output, culturally correct sort;
 network interoperability using UCS-2 or UTF-8 encoding.  Plans to provide
 programming interfaces that support directly UCS-2 level 3 character data (rght
 now it uses UTF-8).  Of course XPG4 support is integrated (as this is a
 POSIX-based system), with an extensive set of availbale LOCALEs.

Alain LaBont<e'>
Secr<e'>tariat du Conseil du tr<e'>sor
Gouvernement du Qu<e'>bec