Re: Stateful encoding mechanisms

From: Dean Snyder (dean.snyder@jhu.edu)
Date: Fri May 20 2005 - 16:11:39 CDT

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    Peter Constable wrote at 8:33 AM on Friday, May 20, 2005:

    >If you would just say that there is fragment fragility without arguing
    >over what is considered stateful, you'd probably find agreement. After
    >all, fragility is the real concern, not whether you initial statement
    >that surrogates are a stateful encoding mechanism can be upheld.

    Fragility is indeed the real concern.

    From an architectural point of view I have only been trying to identify
    and CATEGORIZE mechanisms that contribute to fragility - a useful
    exercise in any attempt to improve future architectures.

    But I take your point about pressing the stateful issue. [See another
    email of mine in this thread where I draw the distinction between self-
    bounding and other-bounding state mechanisms.]

    >> By the way, can you indeed tell us what the "unique status" of the
    >>code unit 0xDF02 is? And if it has one, why it is not spelled out
    >>in the standard?
    >
    >This seems to be a purely polemic statement: it seems more likely that
    >you're simply trying to force Ken to say he's wrong about something than
    >that you're really looking for further documentation in the standard. If
    >so, it isn't a constructive approach to interaction.

    It is surely polemic, but not purely so.

    I (and probably not a few others) regard Ken as perhaps the leading
    authority on matters such as these. If he makes a statement like the one
    I challenged here, many will just accept it as gospel. Such weighty
    credibility demands at times a correspondingly forceful challenge in
    order to spur lesser lights like me to do our own digging. And THAT is a
    constructive outcome.

    Respectfully,

    Dean A. Snyder

    Assistant Research Scholar
    Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project
    Computer Science Department
    Whiting School of Engineering
    218C New Engineering Building
    3400 North Charles Street
    Johns Hopkins University
    Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

    office: 410 516-6850
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    www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi/
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