Re: [OT] non-terrestrial writing systems

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@roadrunner.com)
Date: Mon Jun 04 2007 - 22:31:49 CDT

  • Next message: Andrew West: "Re: [OT] non-terrestrial writing systems"

    Don Osborn <dzo at bisharat dot net> wrote:

    > I think that Daniel's remark was intended in a light vein of speculation,
    > and my response sought to highlight the humorous angle (not that one heard
    > any laughs). No one doubts that there are important "terrestrial" issues
    > WRT character encoding and locales, and just for the record, Daniel has
    > done quite a lot in various practical areas from locales to advising
    > students.

    Back in the day when ISO 10646 was still 31 bits wide and the proposal was
    made to limit it to 17 planes, as Unicode already was, there were quite a
    few, apparently serious, objections that this would be a regrettable,
    Y2K-like limitation because of the eventual discovery of non-terrestrial
    scripts that would need the extra coding space. I think some of us who
    remember this being portrayed as a genuine technical flaw in Unicode still
    tend to wince when the topic is brought up, even if the humorous intent is
    clear to everyone else. Sorry for being a stick in the mud.

    --
    Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
    http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
    http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
    http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages 
    


    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jun 04 2007 - 23:10:21 CDT