Re: Playing with Unicode (was: Re: UTF-17)

From: DougEwell2@cs.com
Date: Mon Jun 25 2001 - 12:06:04 EDT


In a message dated 2001-06-25 2:24:36 Pacific Daylight Time,
Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de writes:

> To avoid possible misunderstandings, such as regarding Doug's Unicode
> Compression Kludge as a duck, acronyms should continue being written
> in upper-case letters.

I hadn't thought of that possibility, since Doug's Unicode Compression Kludge
fails both parts of the famous "duck test." That is, it neither walks like a
duck *nor* quacks like a duck. (What it really resembles is a lobotomized
SCSU.)

So far one of the better comical ideas, "UTF-11digit," came from Michael
Everson. I'll have to look into that. Also don't forget Ken Whistler's
"BTF-8" from 1999 (or 1916?), which converts Baudot text to ASCII, and
Juliusz Chroboczek's 2000 mention of "UCS-4PDP11," for mixed-endian
architectures.

On the serious side, Elliotte's questions about UCS-2 vs. UTF-16 and UCS-4
vs. UTF-32, which were already answered by our celebrity panel, prove that
some very real questions and enlightenment about Unicode can come from this
levity.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



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