An assessment of the Unicode standard

[Hendrik van Rooyen]

Rather elitist viewpoint... Why don't we just drop nukes on some 60%
of populated landmasses that don't have a "western" culture and avoid
the whole problem?

Now yer talking, boyo! It will surely help with the basic problem which is
the heavy infestation of people on the planet!


- Hendrik

 

[Paul Boddie]

I said it before and i will say it again. I DON"T CARE WHAT LANGUAGE
WE USE AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF
SIMPLICITY!!!!
[Esperanto]

English is by far already the de-facto lingua franca throughout the
world.

You don't care, but here it comes: English! And is it a language
"founded on ideals of simplicity"? I suggest you familiarise yourself
with the history of the English language.

[...]

You can deny the holocaust all you want but it still happened and so
too shall the great unity! Sadly because of cultural and social
fanatics like yourself, it will probably take another great war to
usher in the new order.

Now you are just being offensive.

[...]

So you are advocating for me to use derogatory statements in my post,
no thanks i need not resort to adolescent rants to argue my points.

So what was the bulk of your opening message in this thread or the
kind of gutter remarks made above if not "adolescent rants"?

And why do you continue to compare me to XL. Has XL *ever* helped a
python user in this forum? I have, many times. I am *actually* a
python programmer who cares about Python and my posts bring much vigor
and intelligence to an otherwise boring NG -- like me or not.

Whether you actually care about Python or not, I repeat my suggestion
that you take rants of this nature out of this forum and to a more
appropriate place. At the very time the community seeks to increase
diversity, such material is not only insensitive towards those who do
not share your own cultural and political background, it also
demonstrates a total lack of awareness of the kind of community people
are trying to build and sustain.

And don't give us the "livening up the newsgroup" excuse. The only
reason people use newsgroups like this for their political posturing
is analogous to a football player bursting into a chess club and
claiming superiority in his own sport over those whose pastime has
been interrupted: he knows that in a more suitable venue, his
inadequacy would quickly be revealed by active practitioners of the
discipline. Take your material elsewhere - maybe then the historians,
linguists and sociologists will give you the tuition you so richly
deserve!

Paul

 

[Nigel Rantor]

Now yer talking, boyo! It will surely help with the basic problem which is
the heavy infestation of people on the planet!

<bait>
On two conditions:

1) We drop some "test" bombs on Slough to satisfy Betjeman.

2) We strap both Xah and r to aforementioned bombs.
</bait>

<switch>
Also, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Esperanto yet. Sounds like
something r and Xah would *love*.

Slightly off-topic - does anyone have a good recipe for getting
thunderbird to kill whole threads for good? Either based on a rule or
just some extension I can use?

The Xah/r threads are like car crashes, I can't help but watch but my
time could be better spent and I don't want to unsub the whole list.
</switch>

Cheers,

n

 

[Rami Chowdhury]

No need to feed the troll by actually trying to engage in the discussion,
but just FYI:

Sanskrit is mostly written in Devanagari these days which is also
useful for selling things to people who speak Hindi and other Indian
languages.

Devanagari is what's used for Hindi and a handful of other languages, yes,
but most Indian languages (Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali, and Tamil just to
name a few) use different scripts.

 

[Dennis Lee Bieber]

2) We strap both Xah and r to aforementioned bombs.
</bait>

<switch>
Also, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Esperanto yet. Sounds like
something r and Xah would *love*.

Hmmm, thought I had mentioned Esperanto (and Klingon)

 

[Emile van Sebille]

On 8/31/2009 10:41 AM Dennis Lee Bieber said...

Hmmm, thought I had mentioned Esperanto (and Klingon)

Just curious -- has anyone mentioned autocoding?

Emile

 

[Byung-Hee HWANG]

<bait>
On two conditions:

1) We drop some "test" bombs on Slough to satisfy Betjeman.

2) We strap both Xah and r to aforementioned bombs.
</bait>

<switch>
Also, I'm surprised no-one has mentioned Esperanto yet. Sounds like
something r and Xah would *love*.

Slightly off-topic - does anyone have a good recipe for getting
thunderbird to kill whole threads for good? Either based on a rule or
just some extension I can use?

The Xah/r threads are like car crashes, I can't help but watch but my
time could be better spent and I don't want to unsub the whole list.
</switch>

Please do not insult Xah. He spoke nothing in this threads.

 

[r]

Well despite all my rantings over Unicode i highly doubt Guido will
remove it from Python or any other language devs will follow suit. As
i pointed out the real issue is not so much a Unicode problem (which
is just a monkey patch) but stems from the multi-language problem.

I think a correlation can be drawn between the current state of the
world now, and the state of programming *pre* OOP. A lot of duplicate
natural languages are spread out every where like some noob's
spaghetti code. There is no intelligent all encompassing system to
reign in this unorganization.

We need an intelligent object model (universal language) to reign in
this madness. We must wrap up the loose ends here so we can spend
more time on real problems and less time on the remedial work of
duplicating code (leaning multi-lang's) and debugging code
(miscommunication and misunderstandings between multi-lang users).

How many countless years are wasted on humans learning multiple
languages just so we can communicate? How many advancements in
medicine, physics, mathematics, blah, are we pushing further down the
road due to wasted time and energy?

But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units
of measure, etc. Until this multiplicity is reigned in, programmers
will suffer the agony of Unicode. Travelers to foreign lands will need
to exchange their monies And yes, *even* mechanic's will need to carry
around a set of metric and standard wrenches in their toolboxes.

What a shame :-(

 

[Terry Reedy]

Well despite all my rantings over Unicode i highly doubt Guido will
remove it from Python or any other language devs will follow suit. As
i pointed out the real issue is not so much a Unicode problem (which
is just a monkey patch) but stems from the multi-language problem.

Unicode is a symptom, not a fundamental cause.

[snip]

But this same problem also extends into monies, nation states, units
of measure, etc.

There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the
only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An
interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system
in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English
as a common language.

tjr

 

[Matthew Barnett]

Am 01.09.2009 um 09:39 schrieb Terry Reedy:



The SI-system is nearly universally employed.
Three principal exceptions are Burma (Myanmar), Liberia, and the United
States.
The United Kingdom has officially adopted the International System of Units
but not with the intention of replacing customary measures entirely.

The intention in the UK was to switch to SI over a period of 10 years,
starting in 1971, so from then only SI was taught in schools.

Earlier this year the EU decided that it wouldn't force the UK to
abandon the few remaining uses of the Imperial system; SI is preferred,
but Imperial is permitted. The roads are still Imperial, and milk
delivered to the door can still use the existing pint bottles, but milk
sold in shops is in SI.

 

[steve]

I'm a lurker on this list and am here more to learn rather than teach and
although better sense tells me not to feed the troll -- I'll bite.

Mainly because, r, unlike XL does seem to offer help every one in a while.

So, ...

I said it before and i will say it again. I DON"T CARE WHAT LANGUAGE WE USE
AS LONG AS IT IS A MODERN LANGUAGE FOUNDED ON IDEALS OF SIMPLICITY!!!!

I think you are confusing simplicity with uniformity.

Uniformity is not always good. Sure standardizing on units of measure and
airline codes is good, but expecting everyone to speak one language is akin to
expecting everyone to wear one type of clothing or expecting everyone to drive
just one type of automobile -- those kind of rules works well in a small sets
where doing so fulfills a purpose (in the army, hospitals or taxi service, for
instance).

The problems associated with enforcing uniformity within larger sets are often
_less_ _simple_ than finding _solutions_ to deal with _complexity_ (your
misplaced philosophical rhetoric about how one-world-one-language-would-usher
in-a-golden-age aside -- /that/ you should take up with any person of science
and be ready to be laughed at).

To put it another way, it is better to create data structures to deal with
variable length names rather than mandating that everybody has names < 30 chars.

If you fail to understand how that applies to unicode, you sadly will have
trouble understanding the existence of not only unicode, but also of TCP/IP,
timezones, xml and the whole concept of Interfaces.

[...snip...]

Paul: civilizations rise and fall, this is beyond our control. Every great
power will utter fail at some point. Some die out like a slow burning candle,
others go quickly and painfully from defeating blows in war time. This is an
eventuality you must face friend. This whole save the whales BS is really
getting on my nerves! Stop trying to play God Paul, it is not your decision
when and where the blade shall fall.

When a people stop evolving and no longer have anything productive to give to
evolution, evolution stamps them out. If the Indians had developed gun power
and industrialized America they might be running more than merely a casino.
Oh No! Was that out of line, you will probably think so.

Stay in know and you shall endure...

This might come as a bit of shock for you, but evolution awards those who are
capable of adapting to complexity rather then those who expect things to be
uniform. You, dear friend, and those who yearn for uniformity are the ones on
the path to extinction.

cheers,
- steve

 

[Rami Chowdhury]

SI is preferred,

but Imperial is permitted.

IME most people in the UK under the age of 40 can speak SI without trouble.

On the other hand, "let's nip down to the pub for 580ml of beer" just
doesn't have the right ring to it ;-)

 

[Hyuga]

The Chinese language is more widely spoken than English, is quite
capable of expression in ASCII ("r tongzhi shi sha gua") and doesn't
have those pesky it's/its problems.


... for expressing the sounds of a very limited number of languages,
and English is *NOT* one of those.

I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess. I just
wanted to add, in defense of the Chinese written language (in case
this hasn't already been added--I'm probably not going to bother
reading this entire thread) that I think it would make a fairly good
candidate for use at least as a universal *written* language.
Particularly simplified Chinese since, well, it's simpler.

The advantages are that the grammar is relatively simple, and it can
be used to illustrate concepts independently of the writer's spoken
language. Sure it's tied somewhat to the Chinese language, but it can
certainly be mapped more easily to any other language than
phonetically-based written language.

 

[r]

There is, of course, an international system of measure. The US is the
only major holdout. (I recall Burma, or somesuch, is another.) An
interesting proposition would be for the US to adopt the metric system
in exchange for the rest of the world adopting simplified basic English
as a common language.

Bring on the metric system Terry, i have been waiting all my life!!

Now, if we can only convince those 800 million Mandarin Chinese
speakers... *ahem* Do we have a Chinese translator in the house?

 

[r]

I think you are confusing simplicity with uniformity.

Uniformity is not always good. Sure standardizing on units of measure and
airline codes is good, but expecting everyone to speak one language is akin to
expecting everyone to wear one type of clothing or expecting everyone to drive
just one type of automobile -- those kind of rules works well in a small sets
where doing so fulfills a purpose (in the army, hospitals or taxi service, for
instance).

Thanks for bringing good arguments to this thread. But let me argue
your talking points a bit.

You seem to think that a single language somehow infringes upon the
freedoms of individuals and you argue this by making parallels to
personal taste's like like cars, clothing, hairstyles, etc. I am an
American so i deeply believe in the right of individuals to freedom of
speech, freedom of expression. Freedom of everything AS long as your
freedoms don't cancel-out others freedoms.

I am also not advocating the outlawing or "frowning upon" of any non-
official language, quite the contrary. I AM saying that there must be
*ONE* language that is taught in schools throughout the world as the
very first language a child and *ONE* language that is used for
official business of governments and corporations throughout the
world. HOWEVER, individuals will still have the freedom to speak/write/
curse in any other language their heart desires. But with the great
language unity, all peoples will be able to communicate fluently
through the universal language while keeping their cultural identity.
Can you not see the beauty in this system?

Like i said, i believe in individual freedom, but you and i are also
children of the Human race. There are some responsibilities we must
keep to Human-kind as a whole. Universal communication is one of them.
Universal freedom is another. An neither of these responsibilities
will hold back individualism.

To put it another way, it is better to create data structures to deal with
variable length names rather than mandating that everybody has names < 30 chars.

You need to understand that language is for communication and
expression of ideas, and that is it. It is really not as glamorous as
you make it seem. It is simple a utility and nothing more...

This might come as a bit of shock for you, but evolution awards those who are
capable of adapting to complexity rather then those who expect things to be
uniform. You, dear friend, and those who yearn for uniformity are the ones on
the path to extinction.

No evolution awards those that benefit evolution. You make it seem as
evolution is some loving mother hen, quite the contrary! Evolution is
selfish, greedy, and sometimes evil. And it will endure all of us...

remember the old cliche "Nice guys finish last"?

 

[Terry Reedy]

as a common *second* language.

Bring on the metric system Terry, i have been waiting all my life!!

Now, if we can only convince those 800 million Mandarin Chinese
speakers... *ahem* Do we have a Chinese translator in the house?

They already pretty much are convinced as regards to English as a second
language, which is what I meant.

 

[r]

I'd say don't feel the troll, but too late for that I guess.  

The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into
MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling! Even
though you *did* offer some argument to one of the subjects of this
thread, it was cancelled out by your trolling!

Please come back when you have some constructive thoughts on the
subjects of Python as it relates to Unicode, or Universal natural
languages. Whether you want to admit it or not these subjects affect
programming and Python.

And here is the definition of a troll for the uneducated among us, of
which it seems is surprising a very large number these days...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)

 

[Rami Chowdhury]

The only trolls in this thread are you and the others who breaks into

MY THREAD just for the knee-jerk reaction of troll calling!

How does this make one's opinion any less relevant? I think the fact that
you are coming across in this thread as closed-minded, bigoted, and
uninformed gives everyone plenty of right to accuse you of trolling. Being
aggressive about it doesn't help.

Yes, Unicode is a hack, but it's a hack necessitated by the prevalence
(and naivete) of ASCII. If you're advocating something as absurd as
standardizing on a universal, simple language, how about an almost equally
ridiculous proposal: why don't we break backwards-compatibility with ASCII?

 

[Steven D'Aprano]

IME most people in the UK under the age of 40 can speak SI without
trouble.

On the other hand, "let's nip down to the pub for 580ml of beer" just
doesn't have the right ring to it ;-)

Oh those wacky Brits and their obsession with precision -- why do they
have to specify the volume of beer? What's wrong with any of these?

Let's nip down to the pub for a beer.

Let's nip down to the pub for a couple of drinks.

Let's nip down to the pub -- good for drinkers who prefer a brandy.

Let's go get hammered! -- what they're really thinking.

 

[r]

(snip: trolling tirade)

I don't think when i started this thread i had any intentions what-so-
ever of pleasing asinine-anthropologist, sociology-sickos, or neo-nazi-
linguist. No, actually i am quite sure of that is the case!