Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!mimsy!chris From: chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Size of SysV "block" (really: byte != 8 bits) Message-ID: <7693@mimsy.UUCP> Date: Sat, 25-Jul-87 17:56:30 EDT Article-I.D.: mimsy.7693 Posted: Sat Jul 25 17:56:30 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 26-Jul-87 02:32:26 EDT References: <218@astra.necisa.oz> <142700010@tiger.UUCP> <2792@phri.UUCP> <274@wrs.UUCP> Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742 Lines: 30 >In article <6144@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes: >>And people who believe that 8 bits is sufficiently to encode a >>character are either naive or stupid. In article <274@wrs.UUCP> dg@wrs.UUCP (David Goodenough) replies: >Well I've never yet had a problem communicating with any machine that uses >ASCII (American *STANDARD* Code for Information Interchange), ... -------- >(Just out of idle curiosity what size did you have in mind for a character, >and WHY?) No wonder people get the idea that Americans are parochial. Americans *are* parochial! :-) How many languages do you speak---or rather, how many do you *write*? How many can you write while staying with 7-bit ASCII? ISO Latin-1 helps; the `extra' characters allow me to write in Deutsch (if I could) or Francois (look, there is one of those missing letters already) or Espanol (there goes another one), but does not do much for Hebrew (lost a bunch!) or Russian or (more troublesome) Japanese or Chinese. 16 bits seems to work for Japanese Kanji, but is, at least technically, not enough for Chinese (80,000+ symbols!). Moreover, there are people who want all of these simultaneously. I think 32 bits should suffice. -- In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690) Domain: chris@mimsy.umd.edu Path: seismo!mimsy!chris