Text 23922, 92 rader
Skriven 2011-12-24 23:58:00 av Alexey Vissarionov (2:5020/545)
  Kommentar till text 23908 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: utf-8
=============
Good ${greeting_time}, Michiel!

24 Dec 2011 15:41:46, you wrote to me:

 MV>>> Also there are code pages for the Cyillic alphabet.
 AV>> CP866, CP1251, ISO-8859-5, KOI8-R - these are for Russian language.
 AV>> Encodings for other languages (Bulgarian, Ukrainian etc) may
 AV>> slightly differ.
 MV> It FidoNet it is only CP866 in what I see of it.

Obviously, it was the first codepage which worked in DOS out-of-box with only
minor configuration.

 MV>>> But there is no code page that covers both.
 AV>> Thanks to people with 7-bit brains...
 MV> The reality is that almost all coding schemes originate in Northern
 MV> America. Even good old Morse code which could be seen as a two bit
 MV> code (dot, dash, short and long space) only has 26 letters. (and no
 MV> upper/lower case. Same for the 5 bit Baudot code. That worked for
 MV> over a century, so it is not a big surprise that in the early days
 MV> one thought that 7 bits -with the luxury of upper/lower case - would
 MV> be enough. After all, computers were for big companies and
 MV> universities, not for the man in the street. Scientists and engineers
 MV> can deal with ASCII only computers.

When the Soviet scientists faced the same problem, they used the whole machine
word per symbol, as it could be a Latin character, a Cyrillic character, some
special character like Greek letter, a digit, a punctuation mark, etc. That
produced a large overhead, but those early "codes for information exchange"
(literally translated "ª®¤ ®¡¬¥­  ¨­ä®à¬ æ¨¥©", which gives the abbreviation
"KOI"), having, for example, 28 bits (0 000 000 000 to 1 777 777 777 in octal)
allowed encoding millions of different characters used by all world languages,
including Chinese and Japanese hieroglyphs.

Alas, this did not survive up to our days...

 MV> So don't be too harsh on those 7-bit brains.

I will, for the reason described above. Of course, I'll not be pissing at their
graves, but I'll poke at them with finger and say "they didn't think".

 MV> What nobody foresaw in the 60ties was that computers would be come so
 MV> small and so cheap that individuals could affort to have one all for
 MV> themselves in their own homes. It was then rhat ASCII only was no
 MV> longer enough.

Once that happened, why no one said "now we'll review everything"?

 MV>>> That is why I advocate UTF-8 for use in FidoNet. Then we do not
 MV>>> have that problem any more.
 AV>> That will require the development of a new message editor
 MV> Well, there is JAMNNTP. If combined with a news reader, it will give
 MV> you (almost) full UTF-8 support.
 AV>> like Golded, but with full support for different encodings.
 MV> Golded already offers limited support for UTF-8. Keyword: limited.

s/limited/very limited/

 MV> Considering that Windows form XP on supports UTF-8 in the console
 MV> (code page 65001), I think full UTF-8 support wil be possible without
 MV> a major rewrite. At least for the 32 bit Windows version. Changing
 MV> the screen I/O routines and wrapping mechanism might do it.

There's too much ad-hockery in that code...

 MV> Also, support for the full universal character set is not needed.
 MV> (Un)fortunately fidonet has shrunk to the point that support for
 MV> LATIN-1 and Cyrrilic would be enough...

Hmmm... AFAIR, the CP850 keeps the letters in the 0x80-0xBF range. Filling the
0xC0-0xFF range with KOI8-R characters and using the resulting codepage could
make a good trick...

 AV>> Also, the local encoding may differ from transport one - say, I'd
 AV>> like to keep my terminal with KOI8-R,
 MV> Why, if your terminal supports UTF-8?

I don't like the very idea of using multi-byte encoding for the language having
native (locally developed) single-byte encoding for its' own 33 letters and 26
of the only language I know.

Well, now I learn Chinese... but I hope I'll move to UTF-8 later, when I'll
start learning hieroglyphs (for now I'm happy with pinyin transliteration).


--
Alexey V. Vissarionov aka Gremlin from Kremlin
gremlin.ru!gremlin; +vii-cmiii-ccxxix-lxxix-xlii

... god@universe:~ # cvs up && make world
--- /bin/vi
 * Origin: http://openwall.com/Owl (2:5020/545)