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

From: jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com
Date: Fri Apr 20 2001 - 15:43:02 EDT


> Perhaps I should have gone with C, but the point was your
> English-processing English-commented Perl programs are in ASCII. You
> sent out an ASCII email. If you were (?) English

Heavens, no :-) Strictly speaking not even ISO 8859-1 would be enough
for Finnish, I think 8859-15 is the first set that covers all the required
characters. (But 8859-1 is enough for everyday use.)

> all your files would
> probably be named in ASCII and all your daily work in handling those
> files would be in ASCII.

I find that rather mindnumbingly self-fulfilling prophecy.

> Computing people have fit themselves to the
> ASCII space - in Unix/ksh/Bash/C/Perl(?) the special symbols pretty
> much fill the non-alphanumeric space of ASCII. It's adequate for what
> I do as a programmer and hacker.

Adequate, yes, but so was clay and reeds for thousands of years and
for kings greater than any of us.

> It's not adequate for what I do as
> transcriber of books and a mathematics major.

In truly demanding typesetting, like mathematics, we get into areas not
covered by Unicode, like fonts, kerning, the whole two-dimensional
(as opposed to one-dimensional) layout business.

 



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