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From: tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: character sets
Message-ID: <524@talcott.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 13-Oct-85 15:28:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: talcott.524
Posted: Sun Oct 13 15:28:11 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 15-Oct-85 05:19:49 EDT
References: <719@inset.UUCP> <214@rtp47.UUCP>
Organization: Harvard University
Lines: 26

In article <214@rtp47.UUCP>, meissner@rtp47.UUCP (Michael Meissner) writes:
> In article <719@inset.UUCP> mikeb@inset.UUCP (Mike Banahan) writes:
> >Somebody throws in a suggestion that the Japanese will want around 7000
> >(seven thousand) characters, so the next idea is to start using shift
> >sequences.
> I don't know much about all the ramifications, but I think not having fixed
> length characters would be horribly expensive.  I think that the best solution
> would be a new character type, which can hold all of the glyphs (spelling?)
> that anybody (not just western europe & USA) needs to use.  I would think
> that something on the order of 4 octet's (32 bits) should be able to hold
> all of the information, complete with font/size.  I would think that the
> current ISO eight bit encoding for europe/USA would be used if the upper 3
> octets were zero, and that it be easy to isolate font info via masking.

This would blow up all you text and many of your data files by a factor
of *four*. Mass storage may be cheap, but it isn't that cheap. Huffman
encoding would, of course, help, but Huffman encoded files can only be
read sequentially, and writing data into a file requires a lot of work.

Honestly, I don't see why any European or American customer should pay
for facilities that he isn't using, and I don't think that any computer
company can afford to sell computers that, even though they have roughly
the same specifications as their competition's, only have one fourth of
the performance.

						Thomas.