OK, this is a joke, right? On Sun, 19 May 2002, Tzafrir Cohen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> (and the alphabet you are refering to was relevant to the time people > wrote with very primitive pens on very problematic paper. Non of this is > relevant to pencils, and to printed materials. Let's leave this aside) Pens are much more flexible than chiseling on stone. True, when we standardize on electronic-only media, perhaps there can be even better alpabets. Let's keep the discussion focued, shall we? > The ammount of legacy literature. Which can be reprinted. > Hebrew computer literature may be lacking, but there are huge ammounts of > existing literature. Even if you ignore the caltural aspects, the economic > cost of the transfer, re-education etc. is huge. Ummmm....the cost of solving a non-problem may well turn out to be grater in the long run. As a transition period, supporting two alphabets might be the correct way. But in places where there is very little support for the Hebrew alphabet, there would be little need to work around idiotic issues to hack it in. > It may have been economically-resonable, had there been no alternatives. The Turks had alternatives. They did not do this for bidi problems. > Surprisingly enough, the Unicode standard decided to support this greatest > issue of the Hebrew alphabet: bidirectional movement. Yes. Had you known how ISO standards work (hint: consesnus. Israeli delegate probably vetoing anything else) and were you aware that ISO does not concern itself with ease of implementation (hint: C++) you would see this is a non-argument. > This is a standard dated to the begining of the ninetees. Not to ancient > history. It seems that us silly folks in Israel are not the only ones who > think that the problems of Hebrew are solvable and should be confronted. See above. Even if we were, it'd be enough to get this into the standard. > It costs less and takes less time to add decent and standard Hebrew > support than to re-educate all the Hebrew population. (Disclaimer: I have > done no such research, and cannot point to any research that will support > this claim. Those are my own opinions based on my own knowledge) Considering there have been cases of a similar transition, your lack of research as to costs can only be taken to mean that you do not take this argument seriously. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
