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From: lamy@utai.UUCP (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: Keeping information where it belongs.
Message-ID: <1283@utai.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 11-Feb-86 12:56:59 EST
Article-I.D.: utai.1283
Posted: Tue Feb 11 12:56:59 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Feb-86 13:33:53 EST
References: <343@ur-tut.UUCP> <832@inset.UUCP> <692@harvard.UUCP>
Reply-To: lamy@utai.UUCP (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Organization: CSRI, University of Toronto
Lines: 32
Keywords: Character set encodings, formatting
Summary: 


It may already be to late for clear-cut distinctions. My file names on my
Macintosh already have accents in them, and my Pascal programs at Universite
de Montreal have variable names with accents (which are simply folded on the
corresponding unaccented letter, which would not work for all languages).
Given ISO Latin 1, doing this folding, or even defining a proper collating
sequence is essentially trivial (a simple indexation in a language dependant
table - none needed for English).

The advent of cheap typography and high-resolution bit-mapped displays means
that it is becomming customary to see programs where keywords appear in
bold on the screen (e.g.  MacPascal); typographic conventions for displaying
program and emphasize their structure may involve displaying comments in
italic, or strings in a "typewriter" font.  In such a case delimiters become
superfluous.  But I can see a lot of resistance to their removal, e.g. we
still use begin-end pairs even though indentation alone provides sufficient
clues to establish the block structure.

Similarily, if I remember properly, the Occam language manual distinguishes
terminals from non-terminals in syntax specifications by using colour.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there is indeed information in
the font, style variation and colour/grey scale used. But then even 16bits are
not enough, so keeping it in every char. is not a sensible idea.
-- 

Jean-Francois Lamy              
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto,         
Departement d'informatique et de recherche operationnelle,  U. de Montreal.

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