Nikolaus Rath writes: > In that case, maybe it'd be nice to also explain why you use the > term "bilingual" for codepage based encoding.
Modern computing systems are written in languages which are invariably based on syntax expressed using ASCII, and provide by default functionality for expressing dates etc suitable for rendering American English. Thus ASCII (ie, American English) is always an available language. Code pages provide facilities for rendering one or more languages languages sharing a common coded character set, but are unsuitable for rendering most of the rest of the world's dozens of language groups (grouping languages by common character set). Multilingual has come to mean "able to express (almost) any set of languages in a single text" (see, for example, Emacs's "HELLO" file), not just "more than two". So code pages are closer in spirit to "bilingual" (two of many) than to "multilingual" (all of many). It's messy, analogical terminology. But then, natural language is messy and analogical.<wink/> _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
