On Saturday, March 29, 2014 10:38:47 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Sat, Mar 29, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Mark H Harris 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 For Indian languages there is usually a specific fully localized layout and a latin-derived one. In particular for devanagari, which is directly used (Hindi, Marathi) or close relative used (Gujarati, Bengali) there is inscript and itrans https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/I18N/Indic/HindiKeyboardLayouts itrans is the latin-derived layout, inscript is the fully-localized, no-relation-to-US-104 one. I would not be able to use the inscript if I tried and this is true for most of the people I know even though in some theoretically ergonomic sense its more efficient. So in the sphere I am familiar with Mark seems to be right that ASCII == US-104 rules the planet. To go from this small-sample data to vast generalizations... I'll leave to others -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list