From: vanisaac@boil.afraid.org
Date: Thu Feb 18 2010 - 12:00:07 CST
> From: Apostolos Syropoulos (ijdt.editor@gmail.com)
> Date: Thu Feb 18 2010 - 11:14:58 CST
>
> 2010/2/18 Clark S. Cox III <clarkcox3@me.com>
>>
>> Yes, it is absolutely necessary. Converting from a legacy encoding to
>> Unicode and back should be a lossless operation. How else would interchange
>> between legacy systems, and Unicode systems work?
>>
> That's a problem that should concern those who still use legacy systems. In
> addition, today to the best of my knowledge no one
> is using 8bit Greek encodings. Finally, just because there are some people
> using legacy systems, should we continue
> supporting something that is wrong?
> A.S.
Unicode is based on reality, not on hypothetical perfection. It is the result of compromises that place necessity over convenience, and principle over expedience - much to the chagrin of us script proposal writers. Because of the undeniable reality of legacy data - there is still a plethora of documents in existence using these legacy code pages - and sometime in the past, there was a distinct architectural need to provide for cross-mapings, we have the current allocation for Greek. It really doesn't matter why. Dropping support for these needs would be far more detrimental to the Standard than, for instance, not having support for historic scripts, or maybe even treating all Indic scripts as font variants. The fact that the original logic of the Greek allocation may have been blunted by technological change does not change the past. Stability requirements dictate that all we can do is discourage the use of given characters. Seeing as the recommended form of all accented characters - not just polytonic Greek
- is with combining sequences, the current reality is what can be. You can choose to rail against reality, or learn to accept it.
Van Anderson
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