Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: 17.869, Capital Tresillo/Cuatrillo in Unicode |
| Submitter: | Jim Fidelholtz |
| Description: | My comment is more about Unicode itself than the specific question. I
really know little about the details of this coding system, though its aims, if I understand them, seem laudable; that is: to have a system which in principle (and, presumably, with time, in fact) will have codings for *all* orthographies, scripts, etc., with *any* relevance for *anyone*, *anywhere*, at any time, past present &/or future. At least this is my understanding, based on very limited facts, but on rather widespread information from various sources, including LinguistList, and now the 'official' Unicode page. As I understand the coding, there is room for 2[up-arrow]16 characters, or something over 65000 characters. This seems like a lot to me, but maybe it isn't (considering that Chinese has perhaps several tens of thousands of characters all by itself, counting variants and older ones). I don't understand why they cannot just add one or more hexadecimal digits to the code, if it seems necessary, and use the lower codes for the more common languages, perhaps forcing users of some less common languages to use a (mandatory) switch in their software (or, perhaps better, their computer) to switch to the higher codes (over decimal 65535). This rambling preamble is basically supporting an argument for making it relatively easy and quick to add characters, even on the apparently flimsiest of arguments, so as not to leave any former, present or future symbol-using system out of consideration. I would also emphasize that computers have been very rapid now for close to two decades, and all indications are that they will continue to get faster. Furthermore, character manipulations (even multi-byte ones) are among the fastest things done by computers, and more so when they are organized (compare the response times to get many millions of answers from Google). The suggestion, then, would be that, if Michael Everson wants capital tresillo &/or cuatrillo, I'm willing to wait the extra couple of nanoseconds that every single operation on characters will thereafter cost me (temporarily), which in a couple of years will have speeded up by a couple of orders of magnitude in any case. And if I don't meanwhile get a new computer, I'm willing to suffer in silence (grousing would take more time than the total I would lose, anyway). |
| Date Posted: | 03-Apr-2006 |
| Linguistic Field(s): |
Computational Linguistics
Writing Systems |
| LL Issue: | 17.987 |
| Posted: | 03-Apr-2006 |
