On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 12:19:01PM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > At 8:08 AM -0800 1/17/03, David Storrs wrote: > >On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 10:59:57AM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > >> At 7:13 AM -0800 1/17/03, David Storrs wrote: > >> > > >> >Do we at least all agree that it would be a good thing if Unicode were > >> >the default character set for everything, everywhere? That is, > >> >editors, xterms, keyboards, etc? > >> > >> No. No, we don't. > > > >Could you explain why not? > > Because it makes life significantly harder for everyone on the planet > who already has a perfectly fine local system. > > What you're asking for is a massive software, hardware, and data > conversion project, with all the work being done by all the world > that doesn't use straight ASCII. Given that covers a good 80% of the > world, well... seems just the tiniest bit arrogant to me.
Actually, that's *not* what I'm asking for. It would appear that either my question was not clearly written, or that people didn't read it very careful before jumping to conclusions. I didn't say "Let's start doing the conversion." I didn't say "Let's force everyone else to do the conversion." What I said was "Do we agree that this would be a good thing?" To me it seems like a good thing. All I wanted to know was if there were issues I wasn't thinking of. > Very few people need to deal with inter-language data exchange. The > vast majority of data is kept in the native language of the operator > of the system, with most of the remainder in 7-bit ASCII, which fits > in everyone's local character set anyway. > > Unicode is like XML. It's the least-bad solution we have for general > data interchange. We just don't often *need* general data interchange. Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant that this is the case right now (and, given the number of messed-up characters I get in my email every day, I do *not* grant it), it is becoming less and less the case every day. In 10 or 20 years, I believe it will be not just common but expected to have projects (programming and otherwise) that consist of people scattered all over the world, constantly passing their data around. To paraphrase your comment above, Unicode may be a pain, but it is the least bad solution we have. --Dks
