Re: combining: half, double, triple et cetera ad infinitum

From: David Starner <prosfilaes_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:06:50 -0800

On Mon, Nov 14, 2011 at 7:30 AM, Naena Guru <naenaguru_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Unicode was created for a commercial reason, particularly for the benefit of
> its directors.

Pretty much. So? The concept that a bunch of computer companies should
come together to make one encoding that makes it cheap and easy for
them to support multilingual text everywhere doesn't strike me as an
evil one.

> The idea of Plain Text is not anything practical but was used
> as a means of attracting supporters, who for the most part hadn't had any
> experience with computers.

The creators of C and Unix, when they made their new operating system
Plan 9, used Unicode everywhere. I can't imagine a much higher
recommendation from someone with experience with computers then the
nigh-deified dmr using Unicode for his operating system.

However, if you think you have a better idea, let's see it. I think
there's a lot of value in seeing such proposals, as long as everyone
understands they aren't for real-world use. Just writing a complete
proposal out can show you problems with your idea that you didn't
realize existed, and letting us see it can show us where people aren't
understanding Unicode.

> The following line is Unicode text:
> මේ අකුරු ලියා ඇත්තේ යුනිකෝඩ් අකුරෙනි.
>
> I bet most of you see it as a row of Character-not-found glyph.

No, I seriously doubt that. Moreover, no proposal on paper is going to
make computer software support languages the creators (commercial or
noncommercial) don't find it worth the time and/or money (or in
increasingly rare cases, memory or hard drive space) to support.

-- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
Received on Mon Nov 14 2011 - 16:09:23 CST

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