🚀 go-pugleaf

Chiaki Ishikawa (ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp) writes:
>Why not unify Latin/Cyrillic/Greek 'A'?  This simple question also is
>the cause of uncomfortable feeling many Japanese programmers seem to
>have (including myself).

Were we to design a 16-bit character for this machine invented yesterday
and which we tentively named "computer" I would be inclined to agree
with you. Somehow I have this feeling that having the same character
in two code points will at some time cost someone a lot of time and
money. If he is lucky he will just spend a week trying to find out
why he his program won't compile. If he is unlucky, he will draw the
wrong conclusion of a silently failed search.

But the situation at hand is different. We have compatibility issues
which are very compelling, so the issue is moot.

This also serves as a reply to Masataka Ohta (mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp):
>>It must equalize all the umpteen instances, yes. And it better do if
>>the user is not going to be violent when he is told "you got the wrong
>>sort of 'W' here, please replace".
>
>What? How do you think about a system which distigushes 'A's in
>Latin/Greek/Cyrillic and tells "you got the wrong sort of 'A' here,
>please replace"?
>
>The system is just poorly desinged.

Yes, however:
1) it's slightly easier to accept that the machine keep scripts apart
   than languages.
2) from my Western European horizon it is a much smaller problem, since
   most users won't be hit by the problem.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se