Hi All,
I saw this message posted on comp.software.international. Would anyone like to respond?
Thanks,
Smita
Forwarded message of 8/8/96 7:37 PM begins here.
>From: Timothy Huang <timd_huang@mail.formac.com.tw>
>Subject: Unicode, Cure-all or Kill-all?
>Date: 7 Aug 1996 18:51:22 -0400
>Reply-To: timd_huang@mail.formac.com.tw
>
>Hi, there,
>
>By reading some of the mails/instructions/letters on this mailing
>list, it seems to me a serious problem exists in the computer
>industry -- the blind leads the blinds.
>
>If you look carefully on Unicode/ISO10646, you will find that this is
>a political compromise, not a real solution to solve the world wide
>character coding issue. Let me give you just one simple example --
>there are 75,684 or more Chinese characters now. How many
>characters a two-byte coding structure, such as Unicode, can hold?
>As a matter of fact, the number of ideographic characters in Unicode
>is less than half of KanShi Dictionary (1716AD) which contains
>49,188 characters. Furthermore, Unicode does NOT even contain the
>characters for all the known chemical elements, 110 by now. Go Tell
>chemists to use Unicode! There are many many more vital errors like
>this in the Unicode.
>
>>From (this) Chinese point of view, Unicode is NOT a savior, but a
>killer to the Chinese culture. That's why in the Far East, it did not
>get
>any acceptance, except some US software companies are trying to
>shove it down to the Chinese throats.
>
>By the way, recently, it just comes to my attention -- Microsoft is
>looking to a other solution for the character coding issue. Don't waste
>your time to write anything for Unicode now and then find out MS
>already abandoned the ship. I think finally MS reallized that Unicode
>is a dead end without any practical usability. But to save their face,
>they may still preaching the gospel of Unicode.
>
>Professor Timothy Huang (of Chinese Computing)
>54 KuangFu South Road
>Taipei, Taiwan, ROC
>Tel/Fax: 886-2-577-0536
>E-mail: timd_huang@mail.formac.com.tw
>
Forwarded message ends here.
Smita Desai
International Engineering
FTP Software, Inc.
Tel: 508.684.6921
Fax: 508.684.6105
smita@ftp.com
http://www.ftp.com
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