Doug commented:
>
> Excluding the hex-byte characters (which almost nobody seems to like),
> we're only talking about 256 characters, aren't we? I guess I don't
> understand why the opposition is so vigorous.
As *glyphs*, nobody cares. They're fine. Anybody who wants to use
glyphs like these to represent hex byte values may feel free to do
so, and nobody will object.
As *characters*, they are useless dreck. There is no reason to
introduce into a text stream a *character*--say U+2841--to serve
as a visible symbolic placeholder for the byte value 0x41. What
purpose does this serve? Debuggers translate *byte values* into
visibly displayed glyphs (either unitary, as proposed here, or
simply as sequences of glyphs for the hex digits, i.e. "41").
Adding an arbitrary layer of textual *characters* in between
just gets in the way of what the debugger should be doing.
Unicode is a *character* encoding standard. It is not a glyph
registry. People who want a registry of well-defined glyphs that
font vendors can use to produce common collections of displayable
glyphs (for terminal emulations or whatever) should be talking
to AFII, instead.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:42 EDT