On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 11:40 PM, Rustom Mody <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote: > Wrote something up on why we should stop using ASCII: > http://blog.languager.org/2015/02/universal-unicode.html
From that post: """ 5.1 Gibberish When going from the original 2-byte unicode (around version 3?) to the one having supplemental planes, the unicode consortium added blocks such as * Egyptian hieroglyphs * Cuneiform * Shavian * Deseret * Mahjong * Klingon To me (a layman) it looks unprofessional – as though they are playing games – that billions of computing devices, each having billions of storage words should have their storage wasted on blocks such as these. """ The shift from Unicode as a 16-bit code to having multiple planes came in with Unicode 2.0, but the various blocks were assigned separately: * Egyptian hieroglyphs: Unicode 5.2 * Cuneiform: Unicode 5.0 * Shavian: Unicode 4.0 * Deseret: Unicode 3.1 * Mahjong Tiles: Unicode 5.1 * Klingon: Not part of any current standard However, I don't think historians will appreciate you calling all of these "gibberish". To adequately describe and discuss old texts without these Unicode blocks, we'd have to either do everything with images, or craft some kind of reversible transliteration system and have dedicated software to render the texts on screen. Instead, what we have is a well-known and standardized system for transliterating all of these into numbers (code points), and rendering them becomes a simple matter of installing an appropriate font. Also, how does assigning meanings to codepoints "waste storage"? As soon as Unicode 2.0 hit and 16-bit code units stopped being sufficient, everyone needed to allocate storage - either 32 bits per character, or some other system - and the fact that some codepoints were unassigned had absolutely no impact on that. This is decidedly NOT unprofessional, and it's not wasteful either. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
