NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/comp/std/internat/1259

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-21 | 3.5 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!sgiblab!nec-gw!nec-tyo!wnoc-tyo-news!sranha!anprda!pmcgw!personal-media.co.jp
From: [e-mail] (Chiaki Ishikawa)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Cleanicode
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 21 Jan 93 11:44:02 GMT
References: <[e-mail]>
    <[e-mail]>
    <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail]
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Organization: Personal Media Corp., Tokyo Japan
Lines: 57
Nntp-Posting-Host: ds5200
In-reply-to: [e-mail]'s message of 21 Jan 93 00:12:49 GMT
X-Md4-Signature: 182eafb9e8bccc755ebc9faebadabb27

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:

   In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:

   >
   >My guess is that the European users of these charactes would resist
   >such horrible idea. Won't they?

   It isn't a question of resistance, it's one of round-trip conversion
   between Unicode and existing standard character sets.

Ok. Now I understand the round-trip conversion rule plays a big role
here.

   >By the way, anti-Unicode camp types in Japan seem to make a big issue
   >of this, too. [Wonder if Erik picked the question in Japanese network.]

   I think these characters would have been unified were it not for the
   "round-trip" requirements re existing character sets (8859-7, 8859-5[?]).

   The problem is one of an existing character sets having multiple
   possible reverse translations of a single code point.

   A similar condition would be a Japanese/Chinese character set standard
   which had seperate code points for characters unified by Unicode; if
   such existed, then there would be no round-trip for characters translated
   from that character set to the Unicode character set -- the correct code
   point within the Japanese/Chinese combined set could not be identified
   by the Unicode character itself.  No such example exists.

I am an ignorant programmer. So bear with me. There is no such
example, is there?  [From what I heard, strictly hearsay, mind you,
there seem to be a few characters that would look slightly differently
on printed paper and yet were put into the same code point. This
slight difference might be big enough for some to scream and small
enough for others to ignore.  If someone knowledgeable could shed some
light on this mattter, I would be grateful.]

   Unicode has taken great care to ensure round trip between existing
   standards encoding Kanji characters, such as JIS, and the Unicode set.
   That no combined Japanese/Chinese standard existed (or was accepted) at
   the time of the unification is the primary reason a distinction was
   not made [ correct me if I'm mistating anything, guys ].

Frankly speaking, because of the divergence of character forms/usage,
I would have thought combined Japanese/Chinese standard would have
been as useful or difficult to produce as combined
Latin/Cyrillic/Greek standard. Wonder if there was such combined
Latin/Cyrillic/Greek standard at the time of Unicode design.

But then again, the code design efforts today are meant to produce
such combined standard(?), we should tackle the problem in a positive
fashion, instead of just raising nit-picking complaints.

 Chiaki Ishikawa,  Personal Media Corp.,  MY Bldg, 1-7-7 Hiratsuka,
 Shinagawa, Tokyo 142, JAPAN. FAX:[phone], Phone:[phone]
 UUNET: [e-mail]