Pablo Saratxaga wrote on 2003-07-08: > What is somewhat funny is that long discussions are held about > that worst case 50% increase in size; yet at the same time the typical > use of a hard disk is mostly about huge non-text data (sound, video, > images, games, fonts,...) > > I can store all the textual information of the web pages I work at > in less than 5% of a CDROM. I can fill it with some of the images and > sound files I have; and I'm not a multimedia freak. > A good point. I can add that most of the documents on my computer are the ones that came with the system/programs I use so ASCII is still the predominant component of the non-binray files on my HD. No, English is not my native langauge and I guess the situation is similar for most Western users. Even for Asian users it would probably take non-trivial effort to exceed the amount of ASCII in a typical linux installation.
The main point of the size argument is not HD size however - it's cache usage and processor/memory bandwidth which translater to speed of text processing. Not that I find that a convincing argument, I find it hard to imagine a text-intensive application whose performance is critical enough, except for parsers - but most syntaxes out there are still ASCII ;-). -- Beni Cherniavsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> If I don't hack on it, who will? And if I don't GPL it, what am I? And if it itches, why not now? [With apologies to Hilel ;] -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
