On 2014-05-02 03:39, Ben Finney wrote:
Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> writes:
Yes, the headaches go a little further back than Unicode.
Okay, so can you change your article to reflect the fact that the
headaches both pre-date Unicode, and are made much easier by Unicode?
There is a certain large old book...
Ah yes, the neo-Sumerian story “Enmerkar_and_the_Lord_of_Aratta”
<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmerkar_and_the_Lord_of_Aratta>.
Probably inspired by stories older than that, of course.
In which is described the building of a 'tower that reached up to heaven'...
At which point 'it was decided'¶ to do something to prevent that.
And our headaches started.
And other myths with fantastic reasons for the diversity of language
<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_origins_of_language>.
I never knew of any of this in the good ol days of ASCII
Yes, by ignoring all other writing systems except one's own – and
thereby excluding most of the world's people – the system can be made
simpler.
ASCII lacked even £. I can remember assembly listings in magazines
containing lines such as:
LDA £0
I even (vaguely) remember an advert with a character that looked like
Ł, presumably because they didn't have £. In a UK magazine? Very
strange!
Hopefully the proportion of programmers who still feel they can make
such a parochial choice is rapidly shrinking.
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