On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Mark H Harris <harrismh...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 3/28/14 10:51 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> >> You are being patronising to the 94% of the world that is not from the >> USA. Do you honestly think that people all over the world have been using >> computers for 30 or 40 years without any way to enter their native >> language? > > > uh, pretty much. That's why they called it ASCII American Standard Code > for Information Interchange... yup, pretty much. Worked pretty well too, > for many many years, because so many languages derive from Latin, and most > non third world countries use Latin derived character sets; yes, although > missing dieresis and grave and acute accents, &c.
... wow. Okay. History lesson time. http://nedbatchelder.com/text/unipain.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page Back before I was born, people were using computers to write messages that weren't in English. And they managed it, somehow. Can't imagine how, if all computers work exclusively with seven-bit Latin-derived character sets. "Most non-third-world countries use Latin-derived character sets". Hmm. Let's see. Greece, Russia, China, Japan, Israel, and Egypt are either third-world or just so insignificant that you can ignore them and say "most". Yeah, okay, we'll take that as read. Names are notoriously inaccurate when it comes to internationality. Ever heard of a place called IHOP? I hadn't, until I started talking to Americans. What's the difference between "global" and "universal"? We're clearly taking no notice of Martian languages here, much less anything outside our solar system. (If humans had non-FTL space travel five thousand years ago, there could now be colonies all over the universe, and we wouldn't necessarily even know about them. Those people would speak languages that can't possibly be Latin-derived; most likely they'd be derived from Hebrew or Arabic. In the event that they make contact, we're going to have to allocate some Unicode planes to them.) "Extended ASCII" is as international as Unicode, just less standardized. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
