At 8:08 AM -0800 1/17/03, David Storrs wrote:
Because it makes life significantly harder for everyone on the planet who already has a perfectly fine local system.On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 10:59:57AM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote:At 7:13 AM -0800 1/17/03, David Storrs wrote: >Do we at least all agree that it would be a good thing if Unicode were >the default character set for everything, everywhere? That is, >editors, xterms, keyboards, etc?No. No, we don't.Could you explain why not?
What you're asking for is a massive software, hardware, and data conversion project, with all the work being done by all the world that doesn't use straight ASCII. Given that covers a good 80% of the world, well... seems just the tiniest bit arrogant to me.
Very few people need to deal with inter-language data exchange. The vast majority of data is kept in the native language of the operator of the system, with most of the remainder in 7-bit ASCII, which fits in everyone's local character set anyway.
Unicode is like XML. It's the least-bad solution we have for general data interchange. We just don't often *need* general data interchange.
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Dan
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