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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