On Thu, 6 Nov 1997, John Cowan wrote:
>
> (In principle, 96 x 96 character sets could also exist, as well as
> 94 x 94 x 94, 96 x 96 x 96, and even larger possibilities, but no one has
> ever needed them.)
>
Friday, November 7, 1997
Mr. Cowan,
While your explanation of ISO 2022 has many merits, the above
statement is not entirely accurate. Many North American libraries that
acquire books in Chinese, Japanese and Korean have long used a 94 x 94 x
94 character set, ANSI Z39.64 (1989), 'East Asian Character Code for
Bibliographic Use' to include the characters of these languages in their
cataloging records. This character set is based on the Chinese Charcter
Code for Information Interchange (CCCII) developed in Taiwan. One of its
virtures is that all but the first byte of the three bytes of a
character's code are identical when a character has both a traditional and
simplified form; this facilitates index building for retrieval.
Had Unicode or ISO/IEC 10646 existed in the late 70's when the above
began things would have been simpler and progress (e.g., inclusion of
other scripts) faster. They didn't exist, ISO 2022 or its antecedent, ANSI
X3.41, did and was used.
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( jage@LOC.gov )
The above are purely personal opinions, not necessarily the official
views of any government or any agency of any.
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