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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: What do we REALLY want?
Message-ID: <6066@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 19-Oct-85 22:51:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.6066
Posted: Sat Oct 19 22:51:31 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 19-Oct-85 22:51:31 EDT
References: <723@inset.UUCP> <960@erix.UUCP>, <1569@hammer.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 25

> As far as character sets go, it would seem that 16 bits (65536
> possible characters) should be more than enough.  About 9000
> for Chinese, and 7000 for Japanese, plus all the European
> languages, some math and other symbols, and there should be
> room left over for some simple graphics characters...

The trouble with this (and the other similar proposals) is it asks the
Western world to pay a factor of 2 in storage overhead for the sake of
the Asian character sets.  This will never sell.  Most of the sites that
would be affected will never want to store *anything* written in Japanese
or Chinese.  Why should they pay double the storage price (and bandwidth
price) for the ability to do so?

The only reason that the new 8-bit ISO standard isn't going to cause
major disruption (except in a few sloppy Unix programs) is that the
8th bit is already there, and largely unused, in existing machines.

Solving the problems of the Asian languages is a laudable goal, but I
am not convinced that we know how to do it effectively.  The new ISO set
will be an important step towards solving the problems of the Western
languages, and this may be all we can realistically hope for in the short
term.  "The best is the enemy of the good."
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry