From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 05:50:40 CDT
At 10:51 +0100 2005/05/17, Peter Kirk wrote:
>Whether tweaked or not, the useful life of most standards in the
>computer industry has been very low. Few of the ones in use 25 years
>ago are still in active use now, although some remain as subsets of
>more comprehensive standards (which is the alternative to improving
>the standard). Any suggestion that Unicode will be around much
>beyond the lifetime of its current proponents is sheer arrogance. I
>know someone has suggested that it will last for 1000 years. I am
>reminded of what happened to the Reich which was supposed to lat
>1000 years.
It can be instructive to check the history of ASCII. See for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
It says that the presently most widely used form is ANSI X3.4-1986.
So that standard has been in active use only 19 years.
So if ASCII based software now switches to use say UTF-8 instead,
which does not seems to be so difficult to achieve, the 25 year limit
on active use may apply to that one, too.
-- Hans Aberg
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