On 11/3/2017 9:12 AM, William_J_G Overington wrote:
GS1-128 barcode technology is being introduced into National Health Service hospitals in the United Kingdom.
This is so off-topic and unrelated to the discussion. A./
http://www.scan4safety.nhs.uk/ As barcode scanners will be in use, a not unrealistic scenario is that localizable sentences encoded in GS1-128 barcodes could be used for some everyday communication through the language barrier. For example, a whole sentence, such as, here localized into English, Would you like a drink of water? could be encoded as ::781:; within Application Identifier 97 of a GS1-128 barcode. Suppose that this system were being implemented. For localization into English, the sentence.dat text file could contain the following line of text for localizing that particuar localizable sentence. ::781:;|Would you like a drink of water? If the sentence.dat file and the software to handle it were implemented in 7-bit ASCII the system would work fine for localization into English. If many sentence.dat files, one for each language, and the software to handle them were implemented in 8-bit ASCII the system would work fine for localization into English and for localization into many of the languages of Western Europe and Scandinavia. If many sentence.dat files, one for each language, and the software to handle them were implemented in Unicode using the UTF-16 text file format for each sentence.dat file, the system would work fine for localization into many languages of the world. This seems to me to be a very good example of why Unicode is so much better than ASCII. William Overington Friday 3 November 2017
