begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 06:36:00PM -0700: > On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 06:30:23PM -0700, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 06:19:27PM -0700: > > [snip] > > > Umm ... how you gonna map 128 codes to the 3,000 or so characters that, > > > say, simplified Mandarin needs? > > > > String 'em together to form words. > > > > Otherwise, we might as well demand that a simplified english dictionary > > be included so we don't have to waste all that space using several > > characters to encode a word rather than just one like most people do. > > I imagine that the people who did Unicode gave it some thought. It's a > Lan Barnes trick to assume that I know all the issues, not a Stewart > Stremler one. Let's stick to our appointed roles.
Heh. The impression I get from reading about it is that the primary concern is that of efficient representation; it's *easy* to say "/this/ string of characters represents _that_ glyph" -- shoot, it's how TeX does it -- but that does not lead to efficient representation. In other words, bloat. So we have a lot of very smart people trying to avoid needlessly wasting resources (RAM, disk, bandwidth). They are very smart people trying to to solve a difficult problem... I just disagree that it's an important problem. Why? Because we're now moving to formats like XML. Efficient use of resources (RAM, disk, bandwidth) is obviously NOT a real concern anymore. The forces at work have changed. (Of course, a contrary force is that if there's someone that's going to decide that there should be one way to do things, that's going to be the biggest group... and us poor out-numbered European-style folk will be lucky to get our glyphs into THEIR system anyway. In comparison, we're BAUDOT users complaining about the obscene, reprehensible, and needless inflation that ASCII brings to the scene...) -Stewart -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
