Am Mittwoch, 25. April 2001 um 06:04 schrieb 11digitboy@bolt.com:
1bc> Why don't you make the next print edition of the Unicode
1bc> standard (not to mention online) with Unicodepoints
1bc> in decimal as well as hex?
In fact, I do not see any reason to use hex numbers in documents
released for the general public. In my opinion, future print editions
should use decimal numbers *primarily*.
Of course, hex numbers are a concept which all computer and coding
experts know as good as ordinary (i.e. decimal) numbers. They have
advantages if you have to discuss technical details of communications
on the bit or octet stream level - but I cannot see any other
advantage. They are legacy. They are a habit of the experts inherited
from the time when 8-bit or 16-bit entities were strong constraints
for code tables - now, the possible number of Unicode points is not
even a power of 2.
On the other hand, "numbers" (i.e. decimal numbers) are a concept
everybody is familiar with. Thus, why not say to the public simply,
"Unicode gives every character a number", instead of geek speak like
"Unicode gives every character a code point, and as we are very cute,
we use a special numbering system with 16 digits designed for
computer experts, and to use Unicode you have to become an expert too
and have to learn this system"?
If "character numbers" are at last used commonly, e.g. every Chinese
businessman can spell his name to every secretary in the world, simply
telling them the numbers. And every secretary can enter the name
correctly without any knowledge to Chinese, having no more to learn
than the single function key to be depressed during the digit input
(which may be standardized for future keyboards). And (maybe the
strongest argument) they have no chance to confuse decimal numbers with
hex numbers which accidentally do not have digits in the A..F range.
The fact that these "numbers" have a relevance for the various UTF
encodings is convenient for computer and coding experts. But for
the ordinary user, it has no more relevance as knowing the cylinder
head diameter for driving a car.
-- Karl Pentzlin AC&S Analysis Consulting & Software GmbH München, Germany mailto:karl-pentzlin@acssoft.de
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