[Python-Dev] OT: Unicode history (was Alternative Impl. for PEP 292) (original) (raw)

Barry Scott barry at barrys-emacs.org
Tue Sep 14 23:46:41 CEST 2004

On Sep 14, 2004, at 20:15, François Pinard wrote:

Of course, this is the standard and official reason. Yet, the net effect of that concern and constraint, noticed by many foreigners, is that Unicode favours English. (About "favouring" spelling, I find it amusing to spell-check my out-going email with a British dictionary.)

First where national character sets. Working in more then one language was a nightmare.

Then came ISO 10646 which gave every language its own unique set of code points. But ISO 10646 is not easy to process which lead to the development of unicode that is easier to implement and work but could not originally deal with all the code points required for all the worlds languages. I believe that was been fixed now you can have 32bit unicode.

Somewhere in the code point space you have to have ASCII. I'd be charitable and say that its pragmatic that its in code page 0 given the history of the computer industry.

From now on if you use unicode no language has an advantage, all are equal and software authors stand a chance to create international software.

Barry

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