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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: What do we REALLY want?
Message-ID: <787@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 14-Nov-85 18:51:33 EST
Article-I.D.: mmintl.787
Posted: Thu Nov 14 18:51:33 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 16-Nov-85 03:43:12 EST
References: <723@inset.UUCP> <960@erix.UUCP> <1569@hammer.UUCP>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT
Lines: 35
Summary: 


In article <2004@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>	Just to play devil's advocate for a minute, let's say you have a
>file in greek, with the first couple of bytes being the "locking shift to
>greek" function.  Guess what breaks:
>
>	Tail -- you can't get the last 10 lines of a file if you don't read
>the whole file and track the shift commands.

Yeah, you can't.  You can read from the end back to the last (permanent) shift
command; anything preceding it is OK.  Of course, this frequently means
reading the whole file backwards.

>	Grep -- you're looking for all lines containing pi-iota-gamma;
>should grep track the shift commands and surround each output line by
>"locking shift to greek" and "back to English"?  If you do it that way, and
>run "grep ^ < greek1 > greek2", the greek[12] files will not cmp the same
>because the second will have lots of extraneous shift commands.  Do you now
>need a shift-optimizing filter to put files into canonical form?

Actually, I would use the sixteen bit format internally.  You use a standard
routine to read the file and convert to sixteen bit form, and another
standard routine to write the file, optimizing the shifts.  This takes
care of this whole class of problems.

>	I'm sure there are more examples, but you get the idea.

I never said it would be easy.  Just easier and more practical than throwing
away ASCII entirely, or having each non-ASCII character preceded by an
escape sequence.

While critical comments such as this are welcome, alternative suggestions
would be more so.

Frank Adams                           ihpn4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Multimate International    52 Oakland Ave North    E. Hartford, CT 06108