From: jon@spin.ie
Date: Wed Oct 01 2003 - 05:43:49 CST
> > At 11:15 AM 9/30/03 -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> >> Isaac Newton spent an unconscionable amount
> >> of time, by our standards, messing about with astrology and
> numerology
> >
> > One of the aspects of character encoding and standardization that
> > seems to have an unholy fascination for people is its numerical
> > aspect. It starts with the catalog number for 10646, which was
> > deliberately jiggered to incorporate the number 646, which is the
> > catalog number for the 7-bit standards. It continues with the desire
> > to see certain characters are specific code locations (for example the
> > byte order mark) and continues with the never-ending stream of
> > (re-)encoding forms.
> >
> > It's just human nature, I guess.
> >
>
> Maybe we should add something to the submission form: "Has this
> proposal been approved by a numerologist?"
>
First they'd want numeric value properties added to the Hebrew and Greek letters, then when they came to do the same for the Latin letters the ensuing flamewar would bring the whole effort to a standstill.
Still, there are good reasons for the BOM being where it is...
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