On Fri, 05 Feb 1993 16:42:40 EST, you said:
If we insist on being pendantic, let's be thorough about it.
I'm just pragmatic.
I'd be careful with this attitude if I were you....
-- citing RFC1345 only proves that Keld's interpretation
of ANSI X3.4 is that codepoint 41 octal is an exclamation point.
To be pragmatic, it is the interpretation of almost all people.
Ahh.. but that's the *current* interpretation. I've used a lot
of keyboards that were convinced that a 41 octal was a vertical
bar. I've used a lot of keyboards that didn't understand the
circumflex character (reading the Berkeley 'curses' source, you'll
come across the phrase "Hazeltine Brain Damage"...).
Pragmatic decision: To make the PL/I subset fit into the requisite
number of characters, 2 ASCII codepoints are ambigiously defined,
so 2 similar-looking glyphs can share a codepoint.
At the time, "almost all people" interpreted these two characters
as "similar enough" to let it happen. Years later, people realize
that they are different characters and fix the problem.
Pragmatic decision: If two glyphs looks similar, they gets assigned
the same codepoint. This leads to the ISO8859-1 sharing of
the english o-diaresis (as in coo"perate) and the German o-umlaut
(as in scho"n). At the time, "almost all people" interpreted
these two characters as the same. Later, people notice that
semantically, these are two different characters, but ISO8859-1
is carved in stone, and we're stuck with it.
<construction of a paragraph regarding "pragmatism", "pendantry",
and "Han Unification" left as an excersize for the reader>
Do you *really* want pragmatism, or do you want everybody to
be quite pendantic over the meanings of things? It appears that
every time we let "pragmatism" enter into it, dissimilar characters
are equated for expediency's sake...
--
Valdis Kletnieks
Computer Systems Engineer
Virginia Tech