> Perhaps I should have gone with C, but the point was your
> English-processing English-commented Perl programs are in ASCII. You
> sent out an ASCII email. If you were (?) English
Heavens, no :-) Strictly speaking not even ISO 8859-1 would be enough
for Finnish, I think 8859-15 is the first set that covers all the required
characters. (But 8859-1 is enough for everyday use.)
> all your files would
> probably be named in ASCII and all your daily work in handling those
> files would be in ASCII.
I find that rather mindnumbingly self-fulfilling prophecy.
> Computing people have fit themselves to the
> ASCII space - in Unix/ksh/Bash/C/Perl(?) the special symbols pretty
> much fill the non-alphanumeric space of ASCII. It's adequate for what
> I do as a programmer and hacker.
Adequate, yes, but so was clay and reeds for thousands of years and
for kings greater than any of us.
> It's not adequate for what I do as
> transcriber of books and a mathematics major.
In truly demanding typesetting, like mathematics, we get into areas not
covered by Unicode, like fonts, kerning, the whole two-dimensional
(as opposed to one-dimensional) layout business.
