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From: lee@rochester.UUCP (Lee Moore)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: What do we REALLY want?
Message-ID: <12240@rochester.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 10-Oct-85 13:36:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocheste.12240
Posted: Thu Oct 10 13:36:20 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 12-Oct-85 07:20:58 EDT
References: <723@inset.UUCP>
Organization: U. of Rochester, CS Dept.
Lines: 32

> I believe that the time is now ripe for the computer world
> to take a jump from the traditional viewpoint and realize
> that users' requirements in these days of networks and
> typesetters are already far ahead of anything that an
> enhanced character set can provide.
> 
> ++ Jim R Oldroyd

I think you may as well trash Unix then.  There are enough problems
with getting 8 bit characters let alone a universal character set.  I think
the best you can hope for is an 8-bit ISO character set that will cover
Western Europe.

If you want see an approach to universality that was done from scratch,
check-out the Xerox Star.  It essentially uses a 16-bit character set
that encodes many national character sets including all of Western Europe,
Greek, Russian and Japanese*.  Documents can contain any mix of languages.
Since Xerox won a Voice of America contract, they have been producing a new
alphabet a month.  Last month was Amharic, a language in Ethiopia.

lee

* side note on Japanese... you can't solve all of it.  Xerox is following
the standards produced by the JIS.
-- 
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-- 11 months 'till I drop off the face of the earth.