🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6066@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> As far as character sets go, it would seem that 16 bits (65536
>> possible characters) should be more than enough.  About 9000
>> for Chinese, and 7000 for Japanese, plus all the European
>> languages, some math and other symbols, and there should be
>> room left over for some simple graphics characters...
>
>The trouble with this (and the other similar proposals) is it asks the
>Western world to pay a factor of 2 in storage overhead for the sake of
>the Asian character sets.  This will never sell.  Most of the sites that
>would be affected will never want to store *anything* written in Japanese
>or Chinese.  Why should they pay double the storage price (and bandwidth
>price) for the ability to do so?

I don't like having to use up more bits per character either, but I
can't see any way around it.  Non-fixed length characters would be
a real mess, as someone pointed out.  (Previous to his/her article
I had been thinking that this would be a great idea.)  For some
applications, data compaction could be done.

>The only reason that the new 8-bit ISO standard isn't going to cause
>major disruption (except in a few sloppy Unix programs) is that the
>8th bit is already there, and largely unused, in existing machines.

Better than nothing, but it doesn't solve the whole problem.  How
many times do you want to change the standard?  I'd like to see it
changed once, correctly, and be done with it.

Problem is, that changing the standard character set is going to be
a really major change.  In addition to changing software, there's
all those terminals that need to change.

Whatever we do, there is going to be a LONG period of time when
we have to deal with *both* standards.  Which will likely be a mess.
We have to introduce the new without blowing away the old.

Maybe the old standard won't go away at all.  We seem to survive
with both ascii and ebsidic(sp?).  With Beta and VHS, with metric
and SAE hardware, etc. etc.

Also note that memory/disk costs are dropping.  Sixteen bit chars
are not as outragious sounding as they were a few years ago.
(I know, I know, they'll never be as cheap as we'd like.)

We definitely need to make an improvement.  What we have now
is not good enough. A change, any change, is going to be
painful.  We have a chance to do it right, Let's go for it!

--------------------------
Regarding this newsgroup, appariently the new policy is that
any group gets killed unless created with the permission of
the US net-lords.  It appears that Europe isn't allowed to
create groups based on the consensus of a conference.  -sigh-

Whoever's counting, add one vote for net.international, or
net.unix.international, or whatever.  No, *don't* create
a Europe-only group, that's taking a step backwards.
--------------------------
Snoopy, waiting for the day I'm forced to buy a Chinese-English
	dictionary to read my e-mail.
(ihnp4 | decvax | allegra | ???) !tektronix!tekecs!doghouse.TEK!snoopy