On Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 04:06:08PM -0700, Paul Prescod wrote:
> So what is an EBCDIC platform?
Ah, the sound of a man who has never worked with a mainframe. :)
> I'm making a strong distinction between the character *set* and the
> character *encoding*
Hoorah!
> They suggest (surprisingly!) not only use of the Unicode character set
> but even the standard Unicode encodings.
Sure. But it isn't going to happen. The technical issues are long since
resolved, but the sociological ones remain. Never forget the human factor.
> Furthermore, the Unicode character set has tens of thousands of empty
> spaces.
Urgh, this is tricky. Once you move outside of the BMP, the encodings you
*really* want to work stop working.
> If Chinese and Japanese computer scientists scream loudly enough
> they can have their characters separated into different planes.
Why will they bother screaming loud enough? Unicode doesn't do what they want
and JIS/SJIS/EUC/whatever does. So you stick with what works. And, besides,
after the whole heartache of the Han Unification process, it's amazingly
unlikely that all that painstaking work is going to be undone. Might happen,
sure, but not yet.
--
We all agree on the necessity of compromise. We just can't agree on
when it's necessary to compromise.
-- Larry Wall
