On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 06:37:35PM -0500, Ayers, Mike wrote:
> P.S. They are needed for capitalizing sentences, titles, and names, of
> course!
So? In your previous email, you said:
> The message carried by the most beautifully typeset works of the
> English language can be communicated effectively in ASCII
Which, to the extent which this is true (show me how you plan to
handle The Art of Computer Programming or the Dragon book, for
example), is equally true of upper case. Capitalizing sentences is
redundant with punctuation, and any additional information can be
almost always be inferred from context (the best you can say for
ASCII - on two different dingbats may a meaning that will be
lost in ASCII, or two names seperated only by a accent.)
> In my book, adequate computing in a language means that the message
> gets across without causing pain to the reader. Most readers of
> English , I am willing to posit, are not aesthetically sensitive
> enough to be pained by poor typography
I'm sure that most of the readers of Space:1889 would be pained by
the lack of the pound sign or an asterix instead of a proper
multiplication sign. I'm sure that few of the audience of the
Anarchist Cookbook were pained by the all-caps in various sections
of that document.
> [1] I judge consideration here by external parties. For instance,
> many symbols, such as copyright, trademark, section, etc. are not
> used in environments where they are available. This would imply
> that these symbols are not considered necessary by at least some of
> the folks who have access to them.
They aren't available on the keyboard (no, alt-<some obscure code>
doesn't count.) If I couldn't type lower-case on my keyboard with
exceeding difficulty, I'd send out a lot of messages in all
upper-case, or get another keyboard. Since no common US keyboard has
more than the ASCII characters, well . . . I'm sure a lot of people
using foriegn languages have sent out ASCII messages using
transliteration that never would have printed a book in that
transliteration.
-- David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org "I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg
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