Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/17/84; site bcsaic.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!cbosgd!ihnp4!houxm!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!ssc-vax!bcsaic!michaelm From: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell) Newsgroups: net.internat Subject: Re: Is 8-bit ASCII enough? Message-ID: <328@bcsaic.UUCP> Date: Thu, 10-Oct-85 13:27:32 EDT Article-I.D.: bcsaic.328 Posted: Thu Oct 10 13:27:32 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 12-Oct-85 20:42:35 EDT References: <149@ecrcvax.UUCP> <10597@ucbvax.ARPA> Reply-To: michaelm@bcsaic.UUCP (michael b maxwell) Organization: Boeing Computer Services AI Center, Seattle Lines: 25 In article <10597@ucbvax.ARPA> kupfer@ucbvax.UUCP (Mike Kupfer) writes: >I think that 8 bits is still not enough if you want to include oriental >or other non-Roman character sets. So using only 8 bits is reasonable >if you assume that a typical UNIX system will not be able to display >these characters... Along these lines, readers of this newsgroup may be interested in the ff. article: Anderson, Lloyd B. 1984. "Multilingual Text Processing in a Two- Byte Code." 10th. Int'l. Conf. on Computational Linguistics, pg. 1-4. Part of the abstract: ...standards committees are now discussing a two-byte code for multilingual information processing... 65,536 separate character and control codes, enough to make permanent code assignments for all national alphabets of the world, and also to include Chinese/ Japanese characters... It is possible to arrange alphabet codes to provide transliteration equivalence... He discusses the problems of diacritics, digraphs, alphabetization, etc. The committee referred to is apparently the "ANSI X3L2" committee (at least it's the only committee I can find reference to in the text). -- Mike Maxwell Boeing Artificial Intelligence Center ..uw-beaver!{uw-june,ssc-vax}!bcsaic!michaelm