At 3:19 PM -0700 4/20/01, Asmus Freytag wrote:
>At 03:50 PM 4/20/01 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>I say 0 and 1 are adequate. I find this discussion rather pointless
>>since we all already know that ASCII is adequate if the given premise
>>is that ASCII is adequate. I don't see what's there to discuss.
The actual question before the House is whether it is proper to
claim, as I do, that it is a benefit of Unicode that it is "the only
character encoding that provides adequate support for monolingual
English computing", where it is to be understood that
o Computer programming and e-mail do not span the full range of
English-language computing.
o Neither do Microsoft Office and Adobe FrameMaker.
o TeX with Computer Modern fonts is the ultimate ASCII hack, but not
the solution.
o The complete Adobe character set would have worked for English, if
we had had a usable encoding of it all.
To put it another way, Unicode will support vastly improved handling
of English on computers, and enable a wide range of new and improved
applications. Programming languages accepting Unicode source,
Unicode e-mail, Unicode URLs, Unicode publishing software, and
Unicode TeX all exist in primitive forms today. The full flowering is
still at least ten years away, but without Unicode hardly any
globally multilingual software would exist at all, and none of it
would be suitable for quality publishing.
>We are just trying to see if tautologies still work as advertised or
>if the need to be updated.
>
>A./
They seem to work as well as ever. :-)
I reject the circular argument that ASCII (or any other existing
character encoding) is adequate for the applications it is presently
used for. For my purposes, "adequate" includes "not requiring
overloading of character codes", as we had to do when combining
Windows pseudo-ANSI, Symbol, and Zapf Dingbat character-equals-glyph
fonts encoded with the same set of octets. Also, "
BTW, what combination of fonts or encodings is required when
beginning with ISO 8859-1, if we want to add at least the basic
punctuation and math symbols for everyday English?
--
Edward Cherlin
Generalist
"A knot!" exclaimed Alice. "Oh, do let me help to undo it."
Alice in Wonderland
