I don't agree with Ohta on everything he says, but he is very right on one
thing: Han unification is a data error. So-called ``identical'' characters
have different graphical characteristics, different linguistic semantics, and
different interpretations in the different East Asian languages which use
them. It is very important to have the characters ordered in the proper (and
unique) order for each of these languages.
Han unification seems to me to be a very Euro-centric viewpoint. A little
postage-stamp sized country in Europe gets infuriated because a version of "r"
with a curly-q and field of stars surrounding it is an ``important character
in our national character set'' and isn't included in ISO-105foobar69. This
suddenly beomes a major issue. Yet, a character set issue that is of major
importance to nearly a 1/3 of the world's population is treated lightly.
I say ``Euro-centric'' since the ``US-centric'' viewpoint would be to punt on
all this and tell the world ``English is the language of computing, use it; 7-
bit ASCII is perfectly good, use it.'' The fact that so many Americans are
working on multi-national software should indicate to the world that there is
no ``US-centric'' viewpoint any longer.
These 16-bit efficiency issues will come to be seen as being as silly as the
concerns that somebody is ``wasting system resources'' by running a 32K
program instead of a 24K program that uses overlays seems today.