Karl Pentzlin wrote:
> 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*.
O, Karl, nobody was talking about this for respect to aged ladies, but you
now force me to reveal the embarrassing truth.
When the first edition of the Unicode Standard was in the process of hitting
the market, it became clear to everybody that it wouldn't have been exactly
a best-seller.
The marketing division of the Unicode Consortium started some research, and
found out that the hexadecimal base is much more popular than the decimal
base amongst people (especially ladies) aged 32 to 41 and 49 to 57 years, so
they changed all the character codes in hurry, hoping to catch a few more
readers in this important market segment.
It was in that occasion that the printer had a paper jam on the last page,
and FFFE and FFFF (o, sorry, 65535 and 65534) were left out by mistake. So
they had invented the implausible story of BOM and non-characters.
But, now that the mess is done, I would prefer to stay with it, because I
got used that 0x04?? is Cyrillic, 0x06?? is Arabic, 0x20?? is punctuation,
and so on.
:-)
_ Marco
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT