On 10/3/2015 8:15 AM, Sean Leonard
wrote:
Thanks.
Well, "DIS 10646" is the Draft International Standard,
particularly Draft 1, from ~1990 or ~1991. (Sometimes it might
have been called 10646.1.) Therefore it would likely only be in
print form (or printed and scanned form). It's pretty old. What I
understand is that Draft 1 got shot down because it was at
variance with the nascent Unicode effort; Draft 2 was eventually
adopted as ISO 10646:1993, and is equivalent to Unicode 1.1.
(10646-1:1993 plus Amendments 5 to 7 = Unicode 2.0.)
Sean,
you never explained your specific interest in this matter. Personal
curiosity? An attempt to write the definite history of character
encoding?
Your phrase "got shot down because it was at variance with" leaves
the nature of the "variance" open to interpretation, while "shot
down" could be seen as implying some unfairness in the process or
outcome.
Janusz has quoted Rob Pike's plan-9 paper, and the quote he presents
"Rob Pike, Ken Thompson
Hello World
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/utf.html
The draft of ISO 10646 was not very attractive to us. It defined a
sparse set of 32-bit characters, which would be hard to implement
and have punitive storage requirements. Also, the draft attempted
to mollify national interests by allocating 16-bit subspaces to
national committees to partition individually. The suggested mode
of use was to ‘‘flip’’ between separate national standards to
implement the international standard"
stops short right before this sentence:
"This did not strike us as a sound basis for a character set."
And then they go on to list additional features of draft 10646 that
they also found lacking.
The "variance" then was based on pretty deep-seated differences in
technical architecture of the character set, with the implementers
reacting very negatively to the approach in 10646 and more
positively to the basic approach presented by Unicode.
The reaction among implementers at some of the larger IT companies
of the day were much in line with Thompson and Pike. Everybody
realized that going forward there could only be one "universal"
character set, and it became a matter of urgency to make sure that
at this crucial turning point, a technically inferior design didn't
become adopted.
Unicode, at the time, lacked some of the features that we now
recognize as necessary requirements for its ultimate success. Things
like UTF-8 and the extension beyond 16 bits. But it did not suffer
from some of the crucial drawbacks of the Draft 10646 that people
were identifying.
Overall, the level of understanding of the challenges of
implementing software for a truly universal character set both
seemed daunting and were poorly understood. You can see that spelled
out when your read the article - even though it was published some
years after the merger of Unicode and (revised) ISO 10646.
We've come a long way down that road.
A./
Sean
On 10/2/2015 10:28 PM, Michel Suignard wrote:
ISO never keeps previous versions of
standards. You can look into the wg2 web site at dkuug.dk that
will give you some versions of these documents (Google or your
favorite search engine will be your friend) although all that
may disappear any day. If you tell me what you are looking for I
can help you. Bear in mind that anything that ISO does is
copyrighted. Therefore, forget about a free online version of
DIS 10646 of whatever version you are looking for.
There is a reason that Unicode (all versions still visible,
archive up to 2000 increasingly visible) is a much better source
for references.
Michel
Received on Sat Oct 03 2015 - 14:30:48 CDT