Re: Antwort: RE: Antwort: [XOM-interest] Character conversion problem

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

Michael Kay scripsit:

> They once said that about 127.

That's just silly.  No one ever thought ASCII was anything but a carefully
drafted compromise, and for American use only at that.

> Given that we now have Unicode codes for musical symbols, what makes you
> imagine that the number of potential characters is finite? They'll start
> adding every registered trade mark soon. And every Windows icon. 

Neither trademarks nor icons are being added to the Unicode Standard,
although a very few sneaked in in earlier days.

But perhaps you'd care to put your money where your mouth is, as we
say in Leftpondia?  My bet with Henry Thompson (btw, Henry, Ken
Whistler sends his regards) has two years left to run, and he's
losing, since the Unicode roadmap has yet to reach even 2FFFD.

> Standards committees don't have a good track record for declaring
> that their work is done and dissolving themselves.

Although the roadmap is essentially complete, the work as a whole is
far from done: only about half the known writing systems are
representable in Unicode, primarily for lack of money to work on them.
This primarily affects the minority languages of the world,
as well as archaic and obsolete scripts like Egyptian hieroglyphics.
(There may be a few unknown scripts lurking somewhere, but not huge ones.)

To change this situation, donate to the Script Encoding Initiative
(see http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/donations.html for details).

-- 
De plichten van een docent zijn divers,         John Cowan
die van het gehoor ook.                         cowan@ccil.org
      --Edsger Dijkstra                         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan