Karl Pentzlin said:
> 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"?
<cutegeekspeak>
I RESEMBLE THAT REMARK! --A GEEK
*whispering in the background*
What?....
*more whispering in the background*
Um... Counsel has informed me that you may be hexatrigesimally
disadvantaged, so I will convert my comment to decimal and repeat
it for you:
18 2148024992306 1375445 1657141660! --10 765164
</cutegeekspeak>
Seriously, though, as Doug and others have pointed out, there are
good reasons for using hexadecimal when dealing with character
encoding -- and not just the Unicode Standard. Nearly *all*
character encoding charts are arranged in groupings of 16.
The concessions to decimal usage that were often seen in the
small character sets with 256 elements just don't make much
sense for the larger character sets like Unicode, since the
decimal expressions don't line up in any meaningful or
mnemonic way with any structure of the standard.
The "public" that the Unicode Standard is aimed at is already
pretty specialized and computer-savvy for the most part. We
aren't talking about a mass-marketed best-seller here, but a
technical book that sells in the few thousands of copies.
Among the public that actually uses the Unicode book (or
refers to the online documents), most, I venture to guess,
are in fact familiar with hexadecimal numbers. You'd be
pretty disadvantaged if you were interested in character
encoding but refused to adapt to hexadecimal usage.
I'd compare it to being an American interested in Olympic
sports who refused to adapt to the use of the metric
system because "everybody is familiar with the English
units of foot, yard, and mile."
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT