On Sat, 19 Oct 91 19:33:24 +1000, Bob Smart wrote:
Now the problem at the moment is that there is Japanese software
(and maybe even hardware) to handle 2022, and it doesn't (yet) handle
Mnemonic.
There will never be. The people of East Asia are not going to adopt an
arbitrary system conjured by a bunch of ignorant white folk. A crude way of
putting it, but true.
Mnemonic doesn't have the same advantages for the Japanese that it
has for European languages, but it still has the nice property of
being a 7-bit universal character set which won't drive your terminal
to do funny things if you happen to display the encoded form.
That's what the current ISO-2022 is. The only characters used in JIS are
those occupying the space of the printable US-ASCII glyphs -- 0x21 through
0x7e. The ESC codes to shift in and out of JIS are defined for the purposes
of this shifting and will not make your terminal `do funny things'.
I simply can't understand the concerns of our Japanese speaking
people on the list.
Unlike the European character set, JIS is already 7-bit clean and fully
interoperable. The whole issue of why encodings were necessary were to make
things 7-bit clean. The shifting exists only to provide US-ASCII as well.
There is no reason for the Japanese to change, and they won't. They with
their 7,000+ characters are not having the problems that the Europeans with
their 256 character character set are having.