From: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Subject: Re: What was the intended advantage of using 36bits CPU?
Reply-To: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 05:35:12 GMT

In article <1992Oct14.115708.25074@NeoSoft.com> peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <1992Oct13.225620.10861@news.columbia.edu> lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner) writes:
>> Compare this so-called inefficiency with the vast majority of 8-bit byte
>> machines holding chars that are primarily 7-bit expressable ASCII chars.
>
>Ever hear of ISO8859, Chuck? It's an 8-bit character set. Then there's
>10646 which is (in some versions) up to 32 bits wide.

Yes I have Petey, it still doesn't change anything.  Besides, why the paranoia
to have versions "conveniently" up to 32 bits wide?  What if they needed 33
bits?  That's the crux of my post - that multiples of 8 bits have no inherent
utility in character handling in most situations.  Certainly not useful to
leave all characters in "raw" form in the file structure if they're hardly
ever taken advantage of in the vast majority of cases.

>
>> Moreover, 8-bit bytes was created for EBCDIC, an admittedly highly inefficient
>> char code virtually none of us use anyway.
>
>Yeh, but they work just fine for Latin-1, a char code that just about everyone
>except MS-DOS weenies uses. DOS wastes those high bits on funky non-standard
>line drawing characters.

I think you better take a poll on who uses what.  We're back to the notion of
how many of what kind of computers using what character sets are there out
there, not who can find a niche computer that happens to use more than the
majority.

>
>> Today there is call for extended character sets.  It appears that 7 bits
>> may not be enough for a truly universal charset.  But 8 bits aren't enough
>> either,
>
>8 bits are enough for Western Europe.

Maybe not; see your own post.

>
>> with some people calling for 9 or more bits/char.
>
>Nope, nobody is calling for 9. Nine bits isn't enough to cover a significant
>number of additional languages. After 8, you need at least 14 (as in one of the
>Japanese codes) to be interesting, and you might as well go to 16 ("two bytes")
>and cover the rest of the world. That's Unicode.

No, that's pandering to why we have multiples of 8-bits in the first place.
>
>> PDP-10-style
>> architecture is up to handling that trivially, while all 8-bit systems are
>> going to have to waste the difference between the needed amount and the
>> rounded up value of 16 bits/char.  (Or is someone going to justify a
>> replacement character code set with 65536 unique combinations?)
>
>"Someone" already has. Unicode, or page 1 of ISO10646. 1/4 of the combinations
>are just needed to cover Japan, China, etc. And you wouldn't believe the number
>of languages that have come out of the woodwork. Even with 16 bits they need
>the equivalent of escapes to fit all the diacritics in, and a 32-bit set is
>currently under consideration.

Why would you want to cripple all computers just so any conceivable character
set gets a shot at representation regardless of application.  Do you 
comprehend how much overhead that is?

In any case, I resent the knee-jerk rounding up to the sizes some computers
find convenient to use as a poor excuse for proper design of character sets
which should serve the needs of the users of the characters, not the needs
of computer designers.

>
>An extra bit here or there really isn't enough to be useful. It's like writing
>a Pascal compiler in assembler.

You can be a master of misinformation.  As soon as I point out that the PDP-10
could easily handle an "odd" size better, you put that down as not useful.
Then you turn around and claim that we might need a whole lot more bits, but
always stopping at the nearest "convenient" size that your favorite computer
might more easily handle.  Then you try to relate it to how to best or not
so implement a compiler which has no relevance.

Moreover, we went through all that hll crap before; don't throw "barbs" now to
get it started again because you can't think of clearer ways to make points.
Besides, I would think that compiler *users* would appreciate *anything* that
would make their waiting times for slow compiles faster.  On some machines I
wish assembler were written in assembler instead of lazily in C which makes it
slower, etc.  (What's the problem?  you can't "port" the usage of the 
assembler, so why make its implementation more portable?)

>-- 
>Peter da Silva.  <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>.
> `-_-'   "Meglegetted ma mr a farkasodat ?"
>  'U`  
>Dette kan umulig vaere mitt rom, eftersom jeg ikke puster ammoniakk.

BTW, many people have complained that your 8-bit .SIG stuff comes out
wrong.  In most 7-bit places, it's totally wasted.

cjl

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