At 12:54 PM 12/24/02 +0000, Michael Everson wrote:
At 11:44 +0000 2002-12-24, John Clews wrote:However, just out of interest, is there a brief rationale from those involved in UTC as to why that separation of Greek and Coptic is a "good thing"http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2444.pdfwhile any proposal to add a Cyrillic Q and W, ... would be a "bad thing"?
One of the problems is that modern computer character sets have been Latin+Cyrillic, allowing users easy access to Latin Q and W when processing Cyrillic. Essentially, existing character sets before Unicode, in other words legacy character sets, have set the precedent for this unification.
Disunifying this belatedly in Unicode would introduce non-negligible data conversion problems. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that Latin and Cyrillic Q and W do not look noticably different, if at all, which means that the even the (inadvertant) future use of Latin Q and W cannot be ruled out, perpetuating the incidences of dual encoding.
Coptic does not have this legacy issue, for one there aren't any parts of 8859 that can be used for Coptic.
Mostly it has to do with inertia and attachment to earlier (false) unifications. Having said that, it remains for appropriate papers to be written to convince the hard-liners of the wisdom of these disunifications. That takes time and effort.In this particular example I think that is a gross mischaracterization. The mere act of writing more papers will not change the interoperability and legacy problems mentioned above.
A./
PS: the situation for Georgian is yet again different, in my view it has few analogies with either the Greek/Coptic or Kurdish examples, but I have nothing new to add to the discussion at this time so I elided the mention of it in the quoted text above.
