Ar 05:06 -0700 1999-06-08, scríobh Markus Kuhn:
>The story behind this is of some interest:
>
>A US delegate who grew up counting with the set of supernatural numbers
>(you know, the natural numbers minus 13, commonly used in the US to
>label hotel floors, rooms, airline seats, etc.) wanted to drop part 13
>for political correctness reasons (to avoid law-suits at home about
>unlucky character sets). However, this proposal was killed by an
>eloquent GB representative from the Royal Society for the Prevention of
>Cruelty to Prime Numbers, so after long hours of committee deliberations
>it was agreed to remove 13-1=12 as a compromise. [That's the same
>committee mechanics that brought us 48 bytes as the packet length of
>ATM. Both 32 and 64 were proposed, and after an inconclusive beer and
>wine drinking contest in a bar near ITU headquaters in Geneva aimed at
>arriving at a decision, the delegates finally settled on the arithmetic
>mean (32+64)/2=48. The GB delegate from the Royal Society for the
>Prevention of Cruelty to Powers of Two was unfortunately already
>unconscious at that time.]
There was an old project for Devanagari that never got anywhere because
India doesn't really need an ISO standard equivalent of ISCII, apparently.
-- Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta ** http://www.indigo.ie/egt 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland Guthán: +353 1 478 2597 ** Facsa: +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire
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