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

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> I also don't see the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese cooperating on
> M17N ....  ...nor do I see them being willing to jump to 3 or 4 bytes.

    jb> Why should they be unwilling to use a four-byte system?

There are three answers.

(1) If you read very carefully, and allow for breakage in my English,
    you'll see that the mood is past subjunctive.  Ie, I'm talking
    about historical conditions a la those that created the year 2000
    hoo-ha, and the probability that the whole development of
    computing would have been delayed by a larger hurdle.

(2) "Passive" chauvinism:  two bytes are good enough for Japanese, why 
    double the storage?  (Which is wrong in this day of efficient
    on-the-fly compression; note that the same text in UCS-2 and UCS-4
    will compress to the same size; the UCS-4 dictionary will of
    course be somewhat larger.)  This basically only applies to RAM,
    and not necessarily even there.

(3) "Active" chauvinism and M$ marketing logic:  why give the "enemy"
    good computers?  Make them pay for ours and use Japanese to boot.

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