On 10/3/2015 8:15 AM, Sean Leonard
wrote:
Thanks. Sean, you never explained your specific interest in this matter. Personal curiosity? An attempt to write the definite history of character encoding? Your phrase "got shot down because it was at variance with" leaves the nature of the "variance" open to interpretation, while "shot down" could be seen as implying some unfairness in the process or outcome. Janusz has quoted Rob Pike's plan-9 paper, and the quote he presents "Rob Pike, Ken Thompson stops short right before this sentence: "This did not strike us as a sound basis for a character set." And then they go on to list additional features of draft 10646 that they also found lacking. The "variance" then was based on pretty deep-seated differences in technical architecture of the character set, with the implementers reacting very negatively to the approach in 10646 and more positively to the basic approach presented by Unicode. The reaction among implementers at some of the larger IT companies of the day were much in line with Thompson and Pike. Everybody realized that going forward there could only be one "universal" character set, and it became a matter of urgency to make sure that at this crucial turning point, a technically inferior design didn't become adopted. Unicode, at the time, lacked some of the features that we now recognize as necessary requirements for its ultimate success. Things like UTF-8 and the extension beyond 16 bits. But it did not suffer from some of the crucial drawbacks of the Draft 10646 that people were identifying. Overall, the level of understanding of the challenges of implementing software for a truly universal character set both seemed daunting and were poorly understood. You can see that spelled out when your read the article - even though it was published some years after the merger of Unicode and (revised) ISO 10646. We've come a long way down that road. A./
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- Acquiring DIS 10646 Sean Leonard
- RE: Acquiring DIS 10646 Michel Suignard
- Re: Acquiring DIS 10646 Sean Leonard
- Re: Acquiring DIS 10646 Asmus Freytag (t)
- Re: Acquiring DIS 10646 Sean Leonard
- Re: Acquiring DIS 10646 Asmus Freytag (t)
- Re: Acquiring DIS 10646 Doug Ewell
- Re: Acquiring DIS 10646 Janusz S. Bien
- Re: Acquiring DIS 10646 Sean Leonard
- Re: Acquiring DIS 10646 Doug Ewell
- Why Nothing Ever Goes Away (was: Re: Acquiring ... Ken Whistler
- Re: Why Nothing Ever Goes Away (was: Re: Ac... Philippe Verdy
- Re: Why Nothing Ever Goes Away (was: Re... Philippe Verdy
- Re: Why Nothing Ever Goes Away Sean Leonard