From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Fri Feb 04 2005 - 15:30:42 CST
"Hans Aberg" writes:
> The discussion at hand was clearly about character sets in a context other
> than supporting the needs of a few vendors. It is good to understand the
> context of the discussion at hand before replying.
Not a few vendors; every major operating system on the market, every major
editor on the market, several governments directly, dozens of governments
via ISO, Project Gutenberg, Summer Institute of Linguistics...
> So engineers should attempt to leave
> as many doors as possible open for the experts at linguistics. If there is a
> consensus among a wide range of linguists, then that could be made into a
> standard.
You do realize that Ken Whistler holds a Ph.D in Linguistics?
> An unmotivated statement, typical of Kenneth Whistler's style. If the
> description I got was right, that Unicode tries to enforce that Arabic
> numbers should not be represented in the order they are written and read,
> but in reverse, the linguistic error is so big that the Unicode consortium
> will make big fools of themselves in front of every person familiar with
> that language.
Who cares how it's "represented"? That's not a linguistic error, that's
at best an engineering error. The standard could require that English be
stored as ideographs tagged as English internally, and as long as nobody
running Word or Emacs could tell the difference, it's purely an engineering
issue.
By the time you start to insult people and rant, you had better be beyond
the "[i]f the description I got was right" stage. You can _sometimes_ get
away with it if you're dead right, and everyone knows it, but even then,
politeness demands, well, politeness.
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