From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 11:05:37 EDT
At 10:40 -0400 2003-06-27, John Cowan wrote:
>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.
And sometimes not, then. What four characters have been corrected so
far? Were they "important" characters to some company? Are there no
Christians or Jews in the IETF who might care about a problem like
this, where a simple solution might be effected? Particularly if it
involves only a handful of characters, and the precedent for making
such corrections has been set? Or is our standard, which as I have
said many times, will be used for CENTURIES, going to be hobbled by
silliness like this forever? Hm?
>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.
This is not analogous to the present situation, it seems to me. In
the first place, what else is the \ for? :-) No one who wants to use
the \ is prevented from doing so except maybe in filenames, in
systems which don't allow it. (The colon is disallowed in Apple
filenames.)
>All concerns involving human beings -- ho bios politikos -- are political
>in some sense.
And some have more sense than others, it seems. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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