Article View: sci.lang
Article #2493Re: generalised alphabets
From: Alan Lovejoy
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1987 15:20
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1987 15:20
35 lines
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2318 bytes
A Proposal: What is needed is to make a distinction between logical and physical characters, and to distinguish between speech sounds and particular audiographs (which can be further de-generalized into specific fonts). If every letter for any human alphabet, and every ideograph, were given a unique 32-bit (for example) id number, it would be possible to create a 'character look-up table' whose indices were 8-bit numbers (for example). ASCII would then become a particular "character palette" or mapping from 8-bit "logical" characters to 32-bit "physical" characters. If this sounds like color graphics/pixels/color-lookup-tables, that's because the idea was motivated thereby. Also, the possible human speech sounds should be given unigue id numbers (is 32 bits sufficient?), and a speech-sound to physical character translation table would be used to represent each speech sound with any desired character or sequence of characters. The character translation table and the speech sound translation table would become standard features of all operating systems, and could be defined at the beginning of each text file. The character translation table would either translate an 8-bit index directly into a physical character, or else into a speech-sound which could then be translated into (a) physical character(s). This option would be independently decided for each 8-bit character index. Text files that begin normally would be considered to be ASCII files, and the 8-bit codes would use the ASCII palette. With the proper esape sequences, palettes could be changed at any time, either by selecting a predefined palette, or defining new one. Can anyone suggest improvements on this? What do you think? --Alan@pdn
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Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!mtune!codas!usfvax2!pdn!alan From: alan@pdn.UUCP (Alan Lovejoy) Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.std.internat Subject: Re: generalised alphabets Message-ID: <1209@pdn.UUCP> Date: Mon, 31-Aug-87 11:20:15 EDT Article-I.D.: pdn.1209 Posted: Mon Aug 31 11:20:15 1987 Date-Received: Fri, 4-Sep-87 06:47:55 EDT References: <15488@mordor.s1.gov> Reply-To: alan@pdn.UUCP (0000-Alan Lovejoy) Organization: Paradyne Corporation, Largo, Florida Lines: 35