RE: "Giga Character Set": Nothing but noise

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@compuserve.com)
Date: Sat Oct 14 2000 - 22:45:13 EDT


"Carl W. Brown" <cbrown@xnetinc.com> wrote:

> The problem with languages like Korean is that they are carrying a
> lot of history. Today with the newer font technology there is no
> reason to have preformed characters. If you were to start all over
> again with no interest in compatibility with existing code pages, you
> could drop the preformed characters.

Yes, I agree that it is more sensible (at least for some purposes) to
use jamos for Hangul rather than allocating 11,000 code points for
precomposed characters. Of course, we all know that compatibility with
existing code pages was a deliberate design decision, without which
Unicode would have been much less likely to succeed.

> This may be what they are talking about being more efficient.

Yes, but 1500 times faster? I don't know if 11-Digit Boy was right
about using Intercal, but their Unicode implementation must have been
really slow.

> You can come close to selecting han based on radicals. They probably
> have a way to select among duplicate matches. Then you could cut
> the character set down the bopomofo or even the Latin pinyin.

I don't know enough about Chinese input methods to comment on the rest
of this, but if Unicode had implemented anything that merely "came
close," you would never hear the end of how inadequate it was.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



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