In a message dated 2001-06-25 2:24:36 Pacific Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> To avoid possible misunderstandings, such as regarding Doug's Unicode
> Compression Kludge as a duck, acronyms should continue being written
> in upper-case letters.
I hadn't thought of that possibility, since Doug's Unicode Compression Kludge
fails both parts of the famous "duck test." That is, it neither walks like a
duck *nor* quacks like a duck. (What it really resembles is a lobotomized
SCSU.)
So far one of the better comical ideas, "UTF-11digit," came from Michael
Everson. I'll have to look into that. Also don't forget Ken Whistler's
"BTF-8" from 1999 (or 1916?), which converts Baudot text to ASCII, and
Juliusz Chroboczek's 2000 mention of "UCS-4PDP11," for mixed-endian
architectures.
On the serious side, Elliotte's questions about UCS-2 vs. UTF-16 and UCS-4
vs. UTF-32, which were already answered by our celebrity panel, prove that
some very real questions and enlightenment about Unicode can come from this
levity.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
