🚀 go-pugleaf

I happened to find the following review in the Network News group
biz.books.technical.

Jeff
INSOFT-L List Manager

*========================================================================*
 Jeff Bowyer                         EMail:
 Computing Center		     jbowyer@cis.vutbr.cz
 Technical University of Brno
 Udolni 19, 602 00 BRNO
 Czech Republic
*========================================================================*

>
> Addison-Wesley Publishing Co.
> P.O. Box 520
> 26 Prince Andrew Place
> Don Mills, Ontario
> M3C 2T8
> 416-447-5101
> fax: 416-443-0948
> or
> 1 Jacob Way
> Reading, MA   01867-9984
> 800-527-5210
> 617-944-3700
> 5851 Guion Road
> Indianapolis, IN   46254
> 800-447-2226
> or
> Unicode, Inc.
> 1965 Charleston Road
> Mountain View, CA  94043
> (415) 961-4189
> Fax:    (415) 966-1637
> "The Unicode Standard", U$32.95/C$42.95
> steve@unicode.org unicode-inc@unicode.org rick_mcgowan@next.com
>
> In the dim and distant past, the late, and generally unlamented, SUZY
> information system was born in Vancouver.  Rather an oddball as far as online
> services went, one "feature" was that the programmer had tried to allow for the
> use of all of the IBM graphics characters.  This lead to an entirely new field
> of "smiley" or "emoticon" (emotional icon) endeavours.  Instead of the usual
> sideways happy face of the colon, hyphen and right parenthesis; ":-)"; we were
> able to use the "Ctrl-A" alternative of the IBM PC character set.  Having a
> decimal value of one, this character is an upright happy face.  This allowed
> other expansions, such as Ctrl-A and the right square bracket, which looks like
> a face and a telephone handset, and was used (usually in the "chat" modes) for
> "I am on the phone."
>
> "How nice," I hear you mutter between clenched teeth.  "Can we now get on with
> the review?"  Patience, stout nerds.  This *is* the review.
>
> As SUZY users, particularly those who had been introduced to computer
> communications on the system, moved on to other services or local bulletin
> boards, they were usually quite shocked to find that their favourite symbols no
> longer worked.  The little diamond (Ctrl-C) would kill a message on a VAX.
> Fidonet users might find that the cute tagline they had formed from graphics
> characters completely disappeared when they sent the message through an
> Internet gateway.
>
> ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is widely, and
> mistakenly, believed to define two hundred and fifty-six characters.  It
> doesn't.  Furthermore, of the hundred and twenty-eight characters it does
> define, many are "control" rather than printable characters.  (The "card suit"
> symbols on the IBM PC graphics set are defined as "end of text", "end of
> transmission", "enquiry" and "acknowledgement" under the real ASCII standard.)
> In addition, many believe ASCII to be a universal standard; also not true.  An
> octet with the decimal value thirty-five, for example, is the number sign
> (sometimes called an "octothorpe") in the United States, but a pound sign (the
> British currency) in Britain.  As with most fields of computer endeavor, the
> nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.  Many vary
> only slightly -- but they vary.
>
> The point is that there are a number of symbols which we commonly know, but
> which cannot be consistently displayed on terminals or printers.  Certain
> terminals will have certain "international" character sets, but not all are
> identical.  Accents and other phonetic modifiers may be difficult to handle:
> entire character sets are given over strictly to accented characters.  (In
> Canada we are acutely aware of the problems, with "French" keyboards used at
> many sites.  On one, I was having difficulty finding some necessary punctuation
> marks for network addressing, and asked a Francophone programmer for help.
> "Who knows," he growled, "I never use the ____ things!")
>
> Unicode seeks to address this problem.  Including not only the variations on
> the Latin alphabet, Unicode incorporates Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and other
> alphabets.  It also includes punctuation, diacriticals, mathematical and
> scientific symbols and miscellaneous graphics.  Asian ideographs are also
> assigned codes.  This is no longer suitable, of course, for a seven-bit code,
> and Unicode is based on a sixteen-bit address space.
>
> The book gives some background and plans (chapter one), general principles and
> rules for conformance (chapter two).  To comment on these in any meaningful way
> would be to rewrite these chapters.  This is technical material, though not the
> same technology that computer types are used to.  Some background study in
> linguistics would be a good idea, although it is not strictly necessary to
> understand and use the Unicode standard.  There are, however, a wealth of
> symbols, punctuation marks and typesetting codes which Unicode gives
> standardized access to.  On the other hand, any application which used the
> standard in a significant way would likely require a linguistics background in
> any case.
>
> The bulk of the books (two volumes) is, of course, taken up with the actual
> code charts.  (Volume two, in fact, is almost completely concerned with Han
> ideographs.  In spite of the recent widespread use of the English alphabet,
> this is still the standard written language of Chinese, Japanese and Korean:
> CJK in Unicode terminology.)  The charts are augmented with verbal definitions
> of the symbols, and with cross references to similar forms.
>
> The Unicode standard is recent.  In comparative terms its current usage is
> negligible.  However, it is the defacto standard for broadly based
> international character sets.  With the recent rejection of the proposed ISO
> thirty-two bit standard, and the recasting of that standard to follow Unicode's
> lead, Unicode is a significant factor in the development of any international
> applications.
>
> copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993   BKUNICOD.RVW  980921
>
> (Postscriptum - Unicode Inc. maintains an FTP site at unicode.org
> (192.195.185.2).  Some of the mapping tables, and the Han cross reference lists
> are available.  Some tables are also available on IBM PC or Mac compatible
> floppy disks.)
>
> Permission granted to distribute with unedited copies of the Digest
> ======================
> DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters
> Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733
> DECUS Symposium '94, Vancouver, BC, Mar 1-3, 1994, contact: rulag@decus.ca
>