> So the main task of the ASCII character is functional for programming
> purposes, not for pretty-printing. So it's a pity the naming and the
> glyph does not reflect this.
Maybe because that's not really true. Many people still use ASCII
characters in newsgroups and mail lists and try to pretty up their text.
Although few go so far as to roff their entries, I have seen very nicely
hand formatted text.
> Bug-fixing is wanted in free software, but it is deprecated in dead
> commercial standards. So where is the future to be found?
ASCII is dead? So why are you using it to write the epitath? The
Unicode Consortium is honoring an obligation to support current usage in
order to assist what will certainly be a long and often painful transition.
ASCII *is* the way of today, which you should have noticed as you typed
U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS between "Bug" and "fixing" (note use of U+0022 QUOTATION
MARK to quote your text - tricky, ain't I? I even slipped a dreaded U+0027
APOSTROPHE in there!). If Unicode is to be the way of tomorrow, it needs
to honor and support *all* the uses of ASCII, or else those it doesn't
support will simply say "phooey"!
Also, where do you get the idea that expunging functionality
qualifies
as "bug-fixing"? Or do you consider descriptive names for the glyphs to be
bugs simply because you'd prefer different ones? Really, what have you
been
doing in all the time since punch cards that the concept of backward compat-
ibility seems to have been lost on you?
/|/|ike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:03 EDT