The dialog editor, which is provided with Natural for Windows, and dialog-based runtime is not Unicode-enabled.
The editors provided with Natural for UNIX and Natural for OpenVMS are not Unicode-enabled.
If the DL parameter is
specified for a field which is longer than 250 characters, a maximum of 250
characters will be displayed in the field.
A Natural source line may not be longer than 250 bytes. The program editor, which works on Unicode format, checks only that the number of UTF-16 code units is not greater than 250. However, depending on the encoding of the source, the line length may increase when converting the encoding from UTF-16 to the source encoding. For example, the UTF-8 encoding requires up to 4 bytes for a Chinese character; an error will be displayed in this case and the changes will not be saved.
For UNIX and OpenVMS, Unicode is only supported at runtime with the Natural Web I/O Interface. If an application is run in the terminal emulation or xterm and Unicode strings are displayed, strange effects may occur.
Compared with previous Natural versions, the performance is degraded since several conversions between code page and Unicode have to be performed.