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In article <ENAG.91May3200814@maud.ifi.uio.no> enag@ifi.uio.no (Erik Naggum) writes:

:Now, ISO DIS 10646 is of the "insist on all combinations" persuasion,
                                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Is it explicityly specified in any document or just an implicitly accepted
principle?
					 
:but has non-spacing characters for languages in which the "separate
:unit of information" is eminently the case (e.g. Hebrew).  I've come
:to learn that this is overly restrictive in many, many cases.
                              ^^^^^^^^^^^
Could you please explain this in more detail?  I am a little bit
confused.  Do you mean than "insisting on all combinations" is too
restrictive and therefore somewhat unreasonable for some languages?
Or somehting else?

--------------------------------------------

I will give one example showing the "all combinations" principle is not
applicable in at least one case.  In case of Ancient Hangul, nobody knows
exactly what combinations of characters (i.e., syllables) were used in the
past, although component letters (or characters) of the syllables are
completely known.  Every time a scholar finds a new syllable, does he/she
have to report it to a national standards body, which will again report
it to ISO?  The scholar may not be able to represent and send that
character until the national standards body modifies its standard and
then ISO modifies 10646.  How long will it take?  If ISO simply drops the
"all combinations" principle (as with Hebrew), the whole problem can be
solved immediately.  (The solution is already known!)

I am still wondering whether Hebrew is the only script in 10646 not
honoring the ISO's "all combinations" principle.  I tried to figure it out
but no luck yet.  There seem several scripts such as Devanagari and
several scripts used in India, Arabic and its several variants, Thai,
Laos, etc. which will have similar properties.

:[Erik Naggum]           Professional Programmer        <enag@ifi.uio.no>
:Naggum Software             Electronic Text          <erik@naggum.uu.no>
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Kyongsok Kim
Dept. of Comp. Sci., North Dakota State University

e-mail: kkim@plains.nodak.edu; kkim@plains.bitnet; ...!uunet!plains!kkim