re: Unicode -- making a difference

Michael S. Kaplan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:30:10 GMT

I am not sure that we can really count your family as typical in this situation? :-)

re: Unicode -- making a difference

Andrew West — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 12:24:57 GMT

Cool. I particularly liked the expression "Rosetta Stone of computing", which I thought must have been borrowed from somewhere else, but googling it shows only this page and one other page that claims (implausibly) that "the Mac is literally the Rosetta Stone of computing!".

However, some minor complaints. Measuring the complexity of Unicode by the number of pages in the printed book is not such a great idea, especially when "At nearly 1,500 pages and counting" must refer to the Unicode 4.0 book (1462 pages) and in fact the Unicode 5.1 book is only 1247 pages in length!

And my perennial complaint about people's reluctance to use the term "script" in books and articles aimed at a general audience -- "written languages" really is not a good alternative for script, and in my experience children of three know the difference between a language and a script (at least they do in my family). In any case Unicode 5.1 supports 75 scripts, not a mere 30+ that Neil McAllister states. It would have been more impressive if he had mentioned that Unicode now encodes over 100,000 characters.