From: glenn@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Date: 1 Jan 1993 06:33:06 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu
Keywords: ISO10646 Unicode

In article <1hvu79INN4qf@rodan.UU.NET> avg@rodan.UU.NET (Vadim Antonov) writes:
>If a combination of letters is treated as a letter IT IS A LETTER.

So, are <qu> and <ch> letters in English?  Is <a-e> a discontiguous
letter in English 'take'?  You are grossly oversimplifying the process
of determining what the graphemes are in a writing system, the way that
its users perceive it, and the best way to encode it as information.

>The idea of visual encoding (and one letter-onr glyph is nothing more
>than a compressed image of the text) is simply wrong...

Where did you get the idea that 10646 is a "visual encoding"?  Sure
10646 contains some glyphic like encodings.  But they are there not
only to satisfy compatibility goals.  Nobody is recommending their
use. 

>10646 was meant as an encoding eliminating the necessity to carry off-text
>information (which is not a piece of cake, especially in multi-lingual
>texts).

This is just complete nonsense.  I don't know who you've been talking
with, but whoever it was, they certainly don't know much about 10646
or Unicode.  Unicode (and the 10646 BMP by extension) is oriented around
encoding the minimum content that allows for minimally legible display.
This is alredy a well known and understood model for text:  ASCII, EBCDIC,
etc.   I don't know a single ASCII-only encoding that tells me what
language it is, what correct sort order to use, what font to display it
with, etc.  Why should Unicode change this?

Nobody (who understands Unicode) ever claimed that it could solve all
text processing problems without extra information.  Indeed, Unicode
explicitly does not specify this additional information for good
engineering reasons.

Consider for a moment why this was a good idea:  (1) Unicode fits the
ASCII model extremely well; (2) Unicode explicitly supports higher
level protocols just like ASCII, e.g., escape sequences; (3) the
designers of Unicode recognized that an essentially unbounded amount
of additional information may be useful for various text processes,
various system platforms, etc.; (4) obtaining a consensus in ISO on
a universal set of characters is an enormous problem -- expanding the
goals to solve all the problems of multi-lingual text processing
would have doomed the effort from the beginning.

>Take a life, guys. We in Russia did that mistake (DKOI and "GOST" encodings)
>many years ago and came to realize that this solution is too simple to
>be correct.

Good engineers know that building solutions to complex problems require
dividing it into simpler sub-problem.  Good engineers also recognize
that many complex problems do not have a single optimal solution, but many
sub-optimal solutions.  The designers of Unicode and 10646 recognized
from considerable experience in the field that the biggest problem was
the proliferation of incomplete, inadequate character sets.  Creating
a single character set that could correct this rapidly problematic
state of affairs was the single and most important goal of Unicode's
design.  Doing this task efficiently and with some measure of compatibility,
both for existing data and existing software, were also important
goals for its design.

What Unicode was not designed to do is extremely important for you and
others to know.  It was not designed to solve the "multi-lingual text
processing" problem.  Indeed, I would challenge you to create a single
character set, which, in and of itself, solves this problem, and which
could pass through existing standard bodies to become an international
standard.  Your radical optimism about the possibility of doing so
leads me to believe that you really have little experience in this field.
[Not to say that others, including myself, didn't start out with a similar
ungrounded optimism.]

If you want to truly bring forward the state of the art in multi-lingual
text processing, you would be much better off to consider how to begin
using Unicode (10646) with all of its intentional, designed-in limitations,
rather than incorrectly attributing to 10646 a goal of panacea, then using
the reality  of its limitations to shoot down your misattribution.  If you
take the time to look at the facts, you will find that (1) Unicode was
designed by a truly global community, and not a USCentric one as has been
wrongly claimed; (2) Unicode and 10646 continues to solicit ideas
and aid from persons who have useful contributions to make; and, (3)
Unicode (10646) provides an adequate foundation on which complete
solutions to the problems of multi-lingual text processing can be
constructed.

If you have a genuine interest in learning about the facts surrounding
Unicode and 10646, I would recommend a good reading of the Unicode Standard
and the Proceedings of the Unicode Implementor's Workshops.

Glenn Adams
Cambridge, Massachusetts