Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

[Scott Stone <sstone@example.com>]

On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, Jonathan Byrne wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> 
> > I also don't see the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese cooperating on
> > M17N if it isn't imposed from the outside (if they hadn't participated
> > in Unicode/UCS, Xerox, MS, and ANSI would have done it to them, making
> > it much worse).  At least for the Europeans, the languages of the
> > dominant nations all fit into ISO-8859-1 and _one_ byte.  I can't see
> > the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans (not to mention the Vietnamese and
> > Taiwanese) quietly getting together and creating Unified Han in two
> > bytes (look at the sound and fury created when that was enforced from
> > the outside), nor do I see them being willing to jump to 3 or 4 bytes.
> 
> Why should they be unwilling to use a four-byte system?  Yes, it uses more
> memory and disk space, but both are so cheap now that claiming either of
> those as a reason for not doing it wouldn't hold much water.  And if they
> also require more processing power, the dizzying rate at which that
> increases will leave us with no problem there, either. 

I believe that the UN would have to send in air strikes against anyone who
tried to pull a 4-byte system on the computing world.  2 byte is bad
enough.

> 
> So those are the (readily apparent) potential negatives: you may need a more
> powerful machine to deal with four-byte characters.  On the positive side, a
> four-byte character system pretty much has room for everybody (if it
> doesn't, we could go to five or six if necessary).  NIH is a powerful force,
> and perhaps this what you're thinking of, but outside of that, why should
> there be opposition to a unified four-byte character set incorporating,
> among others, the entire Han set?

no, no, we want to SIMPLIFY the human - machine interface, not make it
more complex.  a 4-byte system would definitely be a step in the wrong
direction, IMHO.

--------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com, sstone@example.com>
               <sstone@example.com>
Head of TurboLinux Development/Systems Administrator
Pacific HiTech, Inc (USA) / Pacific HiTech, KK (Japan)
http://www.pht.com		http://armadillo.pht.co.jp
http://www.pht.co.jp	        http://www.turbolinux.com


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