r wrote:
natural languages and Unicode. Which IMO * Unicode* is simply a monkey patch for this soup of multiple languages we have to deal with in programming and communication.
A somewhat fair charactierization. [snip]
everyone happy? A sort of Utopian free-language-love-fest-kinda- thing?
Not utopian, but pragmatically political. Before unicode, and still today, we had and have multiple codes. Multiple ascii extenstions for European languages and even multiple codes just for Japanese. To get people in the major computing countries, including Japan, to agree to eventually replace their national codes with one worldwide code, some kludgy compromises were made.
language. The A-Z char set is flawless!
Hardly. There are too few characters. A basic set should have at least 50. The international phonetic alphabet (IPA) has about 150. Here is a true Utopian proposal for you (from a non-CS major ;-): develop an extended IPA 256-character set with just a few control chars (rather than 32) and punctuation and other markers. Then develop dictionaries to translate texts in every languange and char set into and back out of this universal character set.
Fat chance of approval, even if techical issues were resolved.
Some may say well how can we possibly force countries/people to speak/ code in a uniform manner? Well that's simple, you just stop supporting their cryptic languages by dumping Unicode and returning to the beautiful ASCII
But most everyone outside the US was not using ascii precisely because it did not support their language.
Get over the imperfections of unicode. It improves on the prior status quo. Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
