A 05:41 22/10/97 -0700, Winkler, Arnold F a écrit :
>So let us accept the euro in 20AC in the Unicode/10646 world and
>concentrate on finding a practical and safe solution for the 8-bit
>world. 8859-15 (Latin 0), replacing 8859-1 as the default West Europen
>character set, will not achieve this goal. It will not be safe, when
>mixed with 8859-1 data in data bases without data tagging.
[Alain] :
No character set is safe without tagging, not more 8859-1 than others.
But I am happy that you are in favour of a practical and safe solution for
8 bit character sets. The ISO/IEC 8859-15 (Latin 0) is the safest one, the
only that is safe, in fact, and very practical, infinitely more practical
than any other solution. Any other one so far, even with tagging, is
absolutely not reliable.
Don't forget EBCDIC to Windows to ISO-8-bits to UNICODE and back,
preserving data integrity at all steps. Only Latin 0 will be able to
achieve this neatly and cleanly, in a standard way.
Tagging will be required, of course. It is required for interpretation of
any character set (I would say even of ASCII).
That said, for alphabetic purposes, it will be backward compatible with
ISO/IEC 8859-1. I don't even think that mixing Latin-0 new characters with
the Latin-1 characters (presumably in absence of tagging) that share the
same positions in the table will be frequent in practice, I guess that not
so many people use these characters of Latin 1 since they are on very few
keyboards anyway, and certainly not on American keyboards (;
Saying that there will be vast mixing occurrences is not based on practical
evidence.
Alain LaBonté
Cornwall (Ontario)
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