Re: Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard

From: Steve O'Hara-Smith (steveo_at_eircom.net)
Date: 02/09/05 

Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 12:14:16 +0000

On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 12:00:02 GMT
Morten Reistad <firstname@lastname.pr1v.n0> wrote:

> In article <20050209095631.06c11d7e.steveo@eircom.net>,
> Steve O'Hara-Smith <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
> >On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 13:33:12 -0500
> >K Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote:
> >
> >> You're short 624,201,325 of half the world's population.
> >>
> >> You'd have to add in:
> >> Indonesia = 238,452,952
> >> Pakistan = 159,196,336
> >> Bangladesh = 141,340,476
> >> Vietnam = 82,662,800
> >>
> >> and still have two and a half million left over. ;-)
> >
> > Russia will take care of that easily enough :)
>
> But you cannot credit all of them to the "weird glyph" alphabets.

        I can credit all of them with needing more than ASCII.

> Indonesia didn't use much else than standard US characters (OK,
> some accents, but nowhere as many as France, and all of it
> well within ISO-8859-1).

        ISO-8859-1 is (as you well know) not ASCII. One of the best
reasons for Unicode is to escape the mess of incompatible extenstions
to ASCII - for example most of Europe needs ISO-8859-15 not ISO-8859-1
just to talk about money :)

> I'll marginally concede India because of the official status
> of Hindi.

        India has a *lot* of scripts in Unicode.

> So, with Indonesia and Vietnam out, you still need Russia and most

        Put them back in because of the accents :)

> of the large Arab nations. You may have forgotten the Republic of

        Go on throw in the Arab nations - they certainly need more than
ASCII.

> China though; the Chinese count seemed low.

        I didn't do the counts - anyway if I add in Europe as an example
of needing more than ASCII I have no trouble getting over 50%.

        Once you get outside US, UK, AU and a handful of small countries
ASCII is no longer enough and the ISO codepages are a RPITA.

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