Re: A basic question on encoding Latin characters

From: Scott Horne (shorne@metaphasetech.com)
Date: Mon Sep 27 1999 - 13:00:02 EDT


John Cowan wrote:
>
> John Hudson scripsit:
>
> > While I'm sympathetic to the desire to
> > enforce the abstract character philosophy in Unicode, I don't want to be
> > the person who has to explain to the Chechens why the Germans, French,
> > Dutch, Italians, etc., can have all their diacritic letters encoded but the
> > Chechens cannot.
>
> "Because the Germans, French, Dutch, and Italians were forced to use
> obsolete 8-bit character sets with which ISO 10646 is forced to
> be one-for-one interconvertible. As an emerging computer-using
> nation, you are free to use ISO 10646 as it was intended to be used."

How about

"Because speakers of English, German, French, Dutch, and Italian occupy
a superior position in the world, their languages will continue to enjoy
thorough support on computers. As an economically unimportant nation,
you are free to take up one of those languages when you find (as you
inevitably will) that the computer industry doesn't give a tinker's damn
about yours."

Scott Horne



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