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Re: going back to stone axes -Reply
>Ed Reed writes:
>> But there is a fundamental concern I have with your base assumption that
>> ascii, especially 7 bit ascii (the lingua franca of the SMTP world) is
>> adequate as a character set for representing something as fundamental
>> as identity representations around the world. It's not.
>I didn't say it was. I merely asserted that ASCII had certain benefits
>over a binary encoding that were not shared by a UNICODE encoding. My
>assertion (personal, not as chair) is that if we weren't going with
>ASCII, we wouldn't want to go with a UNICODE encoding but with a
>binary encoding.
My main annoyance with Unicode is that there are binary patterns it
doesn't represent, so you can't take your Unicode text editor
and edit arbitrary binary files the way you can with Emacs;
this means that Unicode tools will always be limited (if useful) hacks
the way ASCII-only tools are.
However, we should keep in mind that formats like
keyid, name, address
need to handle non-7-bit names.
#--
# Thanks; Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com / billstewart@attmail.com +1-415-442-2215
# http://www.idiom.com/~wcs Pager +1-408-787-1281