Re: Cultural bias

From: Michael Everson ([email protected])
Date: Mon Jan 13 1997 - 10:28:21 EST


At 08:12 -0800 1997-01-13, [email protected] wrote:
>I do not believe we should be overly concerned with density of information
>coding. Communications technology has increased its capacity 100 fold per
>decade over the past two decades while computing technology has only
>increased its capacity about 10 fold per decade in the same timeframe. The
>cost of RAM and hard disk storage has plummeted in my neck of the woods
>over the past two months to the point that even on my starving student
>standards (wish it showed at the waistline!) I can be carefree about data
>storage.

Can you? What languages do you write?

Do you understand that a six-letter word like �ir�g� is very common, in our
language, and that storing it as nine characters is an unnecessary burden.
Let's say I have an electronic text of 60K. Suddenly it gets "decomposed"
and becomes 90K. I don't feel served by this.

This is why there are letters with diacritics (not I do not say
"precomposed characters") in the standard. Because they are letters.

My name is Michael. Seven letters. Seven characters. In Irish my name is
M�che�l. Seven letters. In Latin 1, Mac Roman, CP850, seven characters. Why
should that be converted to nine characters?

--
Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta
15 Port Chaeimhghein �ochtarach; Baile �tha Cliath 2; �ire (Ireland)
Guth�in:  +353 1 478-2597, +353 1 283-9396
http://www.indigo.ie/egt
27 P�irc an Fh�ithlinn; Baile an Bh�thair; Co. �tha Cliath; �ire



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