At 10:40 PM 11/17/94, Masataka Ohta wrote:
Yes. ISO10646/UNICODE is utterly ridiculous in several ways including
your point. I've heard that even the infamous ISO is modifying it to
bound the allowable repertoiries of combining characters.
The project editor for ISO/IEC 10646-1 WG2, who happens to be my manager,
says that no such modifications are being contemplated. If you wish to
contradict this I hope you can cite a more authoritative source.
But, don't forget that, though major European languages are
covered by precombined characters of ISO10646/UNICODE, a lot of
otheer glyphs are not, some of which may be represented with
combining characters of ISO 2022 or ISO10646/UNICODE, which
makes ISO10646/UNICODE just as complex as ISO 2022. Compared
to the involved complexitty off ISO10646/UNICODE, parsing of
desgnation escape seqences of ISO 2022 is nothing.
Masataka Ohta
If your goal is writing global software, combining characters cannot be
avoided. You cannot support Arabic and other cursive languages without this
kind of technology. Most of the work is done in the text display or font
subsystem, transparently to application programs.
----------------------------
David Goldsmith
david_goldsmith(_at_)taligent(_dot_)com
Senior Scientist
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233