Re: tlug: A couple of questions about Unicode

["J. David Beutel" <jdb@example.com>]

On Mon, 12 Jan 1998, Gaspar Sinai wrote:

>   o there is a codespace where two 16-bit characters are used to map a 
>     portion of the UCS4 space into UCS2.
>   o if you want to process  some Indian or Arabic scripts you need to
>     combine two 16-bit unicode character to form a single glyph.

I still have difficulty believing that such a nasty hack was done.
Can we pretend that it wasn't?

> o Unicode is not consistent to the rules it set to itself. You would 
>   expect that the wide ASCII characters would have the ASCII values just
>   like wide Cyrillic or Greek but this is not the case. For some strange 
>   reason they kept the wide ASCII.

I agree that wide ASCII does not deserve its own encoding--it should
be a font thing.  I don't know about wide Cyrillic nor Greek,
but my understanding about the wide ASCII is that Unicode includes
distinct encodings for all chars of all national character sets,
including JIS X 0208, which has both normal and wide ASCII.
No chars within a single national char set were unified, so that
encoding translations of any such set to Unicode and back will
be identical.  I think it's a good rule.  Of course, Shift-JIS
is not a national char set.

--
David Beutel    A monk asked Hyakujo, "What is the most wonderful thing in
jdb@example.com    life?"  Hyakujo replied, "Sitting alone on the great Taiyu
11011011            mountain."  As the monk bowed, Hyakujo struck him.

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