[Gnu-arch-users] Re: [semi-OT] Unicode / han unification (was Re: Spaces ...)

[Tom Lord]

    > From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>

    > It's at best rumour, but I have heard that a major impetus
    > behind han unification was to save space (in a 16-bit encoding),
    > not `correctness'.

You make it sound like correctness was sacrificed for compactness.
Unicode has been under sufficient scrutiny that I find that hard to
believe.  

That compactness may have been a major goal sounds, to me, like a
complete win.


    > My personal test is the `README test':  I'd like `cat README' to always
    > yield something appropriate even on a dumb terminal -- even if the README
    > file is part of a Chinese package, and I'm reading it on my American
    > computer (say at a university where the computer systems have to cater to 
a
    > very diverse audience).

    > As far as I know, basic Unicode doesn't do this correctly for CJK, though
    > it apparently does for other character sets.

That flatly contradicts the assertions of the Unicode Consortium.
They maintain that, in fact, your dumb terminal can use a font which
will be readable to everyone (who can read these languages in the
first place).   So I'm skeptical of your claim.

That particular dumb terminals may fail this test would not surprise
me, but I'd say (at this point) that that's a bug in the terminal, not
the character set.

-t