On Sat, Nov 23, 2002 at 02:26:58PM -0500, Klaus-Peter Schrage wrote: > > Has anybody ever thought about a latin localisation/distro?
Well, no, but it clearly has certain advantages. > The advandages would be evident: > > - The latin alphabet has only about 22 characters, just > uppercase, no numerals. So there would be no mess with > fonts, encodings etc. The character set certainly becomes easier to work with, I'll grant you that. > - Input/output devices could be dramatically simplified > (keyboards, Postsript controlled stonecutting devices). I'd have to upgrade my printer to support papyrus and scrolls, though. I wonder how much the Postcript IV option would cost? > - As I remember from my school days, latin sentences tend to > be very compact. So, together with the 5-bit character code, > no zipping would be necessary when transmitting huge texts > over the Internet. Moreover, strictly numeric documents would compress quite nicely. Lots of repeated M, C, V, X, and I characters, dontcha know. > Of course, there would be some minor disadvantages: > - Hardly anybody can speak or read latin, perhaps aside from > a few old men in the Vatican and Robert Black Eagle. > - Computational algorithms in latin are a bit clumsy and > hard to implement, think of > MCCCXCXXXVIII + LXXXIX = ??? There's a more fundamental problem: lacking 0 (zero), C programs couldn't terminate properly and all of those calcuations that resolve to 0 (zero) would have to be discarded. On the other hand, if you've got one of the original Pentium chips, perhaps the imprecision wouldn't be a problem. ;-) Kurt -- BORGES SUMUS. RESISTERE INUTILE EST. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe/Suspend/Etc -> http://www.linux-sxs.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
