RE: ASCII adequacy (was: RE: benefits of unicode)

From: jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com
Date: Fri Apr 20 2001 - 15:02:17 EDT


> On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 11:31:10AM -0500, Ayers, Mike wrote:
> > Errr - my point is:
> >
> > "If you attempt to promote Unicode by saying that it now enables
> > adequate computing in English, you will not be well received."
> >
> > What's yours?
>
> Depends on who you're talking to and what you mean by adequate
> computing. If you're talking to some Unix grognard about Perl
> hacking,

Oy! I resemble that remark.

Of course I am rather biased but I still think your comment is somewhat
off the mark and unfair. Perl is and now been for years rather committed
to providing a good Unicode support. We are far from perfect but definitely
getting there. After all, it's just text -- and Perl rather fancies itself
to be rather good at that.

> then yes, you will not be well recieved. But for large
> groups of people - publishers, authors, mathematians, scientists,
> programs limited to the ASCII character set just don't cut it. (Of
> course, Unicode isn't neccessary for those people; many got by just
> fine with TeX and WordPerfect and other programs that have larger

I understand that Omega, a (La)TeX variant does Unicode.

> than an 8-bit character set via kludges.)



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