Aliquis scripsit:
> Backwards compatibility stroke. As vendors changed the mappings, they kept
> the same names so that they would not have to update software to use the new
> names. Typically the changes are thought to enhance the encoding, and people
> want everybody to benefit (isn't that ironic?). Shift_JIS is my favorite
> incompatible charset. And just think of things like putting the Euro sign in
> a bunch of encodings w/o changing their names, or of when Windows-1252 was
> advertised as iso-8859-1 for interoperability purposes... It's a dangerous
> world ;)
If adding characters to coded character sets is taboo (as opposed to
removing or changing them) then ISO 10646 needs about 35 different names,
one for each version and amendment.
Adding characters is really not a problem. If you can't cope with a
character, at least you know not to destroy it. It's inconsistent
to treat this as a virtue of Unicode and a vice of CP 1252.
-- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore --Douglas Hofstadter
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