Re: Unicode is optimal for Chinese/Japanese multilingual texts

[Tomohiro KUBOTA]

Hi,

At Mon, 2 Apr 2001 21:27:55 +0400,
Alexander Voropay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>  Otherwise, it is possible to introduce new characters in future versions
> of Unocode (ISO-10646) if they has really different glyph. The Unicode
> codespace is big and open :-)

Even experts have different opinion on whether Han Variants should be
treated as variants of same "character" or entirely different
"characters".  Both opinions have their own advantages and disadvantages.
 - "variants of same character" view
   - advantage: simple "grep" implementation can check all characters
     with same meaning.
   - disadvantage: complex implementations is needed when distinction
     of Variants is needed.
 - "entirely different character" view
   - advantage: no mechanism is needed to distinguish Variants.
   - disadvantage: when one need to ignore Variants, some mechanism
     is needed.

Unicode's view is "same character" (this is why Variants are unified
into one codepoint).  This cannot be changed.  Thus, it is a natural
conclusion that Unicode must accept disadvantage of "same character"
view.

Thus, bigness of the code space of Unicode is not a problem.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/

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