From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 10:40:00 EDT
Karljürgen Feuerherm scripsit:
> 1. Everyone is more or less agreed that the present combining class rules as
> they apply to BH contain mistakes. The clearly preferential way to deal with
> mistakes in any technological/computing software environment is to FIX them.
Not so. Sometimes stability is more important than correctness. The use of
the backslash character in DOS/Windows systems as a path separator is
arguably a mistake (paths were borrowed from Unix into DOS 2.0, but the
slash was already in use for command-line options, something inherited from
CP/M and the ancestral CLI running back through DEC operating systems),
but fixing it is out of the question.
> Several people have expressed reasons why this can't be (practically) be
> done--which mainly seem to stem from political concerns.
All concerns involving human beings -- ho bios politikos -- are political
in some sense.
> 2. Consequently ANY OTHER solution than 'FIX the obvious mistake(s)' is a
> kludge (contra Philippe's (?) recent comment). One *pays* for all kludges,
One pays for all *choices*.
-- Do NOT stray from the path! John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> --Gandalf http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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