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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!enea!erix!robert
From: robert@erix.UUCP (Robert Virding)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: What do we REALLY want?
Message-ID: <988@erix.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 30-Oct-85 06:10:48 EST
Article-I.D.: erix.988
Posted: Wed Oct 30 06:10:48 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 11:09:12 EST
References: <723@inset.UUCP> <960@erix.UUCP> <1569@hammer.UUCP> <6066@utzoo.UUCP> <224@l5.uucp>
Reply-To: robert@erix.UUCP (Robert Virding)
Organization: L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 37

In article <224@l5.uucp> gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>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...
>> 
>> 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.

The way I see is that *everyone* will have to pay a price to allow
"foreign" character sets.  And anyway there are more Asians than
people with european origins so it seems only just. :-)

>I think the proposals are that a coding scheme for text be defined which
>allows 16-bit characters to be escape-coded into an 8-bit text stream.
>The arguments mostly center on what kind of coding scheme would fit both
>the needs of few-16-bit-char folks and few-8-bit-char folks without wasting
>too much storage for either.

Wow, this sounds like trying to convert ITS-Emacs' 9-bit ascii into
7-bit sequences, but 7 bits worse.  Talk about breaking existing
programs.  Ans who is to say that the *english* alphabet should be in
the 8-bit set?

>Internally to an international program, characters would be 16 bits,
>but stdio routines (printw, fprintw, sscanw, etc) would encode to a
>bytestream on the way in and out.  ("w" for "world" or "wide").

Does this mean there will be two basically different types of programs
that handle text?  And will these two worlds be able to communicate
with each other through text files?  This sounds a little like "we
have to accept that the rest of the world may like to use their own
language, but  if we english speakers are going to
have to change anything their sakes".

			Robert Virding  @ L M Ericsson, Stockholm
			UUCP: {decvax,philabs,seismo}!mcvax!enea!erix!robert