On Thu, 01 May 2014 21:42:21 -0700, Rustom Mody wrote:
> Whats the best cure for headache? > > Cut off the head o_O I don't think so. > Whats the best cure for Unicode? > > Ascii Unicode is not a problem to be solved. The inability to write standard human text in ASCII is a problem, e.g. one cannot write “ASCII For Dummies” © 2014 by Zöe Smith, now on sale 99¢ so even *Americans* cannot represent all their common characters in ASCII, let alone specialised characters from mathematics, science, the printing industry, and law. And even Americans sometimes need to write text in Foreign. Where is your ASCII now? The solution is to have at least one encoding which contains the additional characters needed. The plethora of such additional encodings is a problem. The solution is a single encoding that covers all needed characters, like Unicode, so that there is no need to handle multiple encodings. The inability for plain text files to record metadata of what encoding they use is a problem. The solution is to standardize on a single, world- wide encoding, like Unicode. > Saying however that there is no headache in unicode does not make the > headache go away: > > http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/1/5/unicode-in-2-and-3/ > > No I am not saying that the contents/style/tone are right. However > people are evidently suffering the transition. Denying it is not a help. Transitions are always more painful than after the transition has settled down. As I have said repeatedly, I look forward for the day when nobody but document archivists and academics need care about legacy encodings. But we're not there yet. > And unicode consortium's ways are not exactly helpful to its own cause: > Imagine the C standard committee deciding that adding mandatory garbage > collection to C is a neat idea > > Unicode consortium's going from old BMP to current (6.0) SMPs to > who-knows-what in the future is similar. I don't see the connection. -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
