Re: [Pan-users] Annoying ' in posts

[Paul Crawford]

On 21/09/12 14:59, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
<snip>
> (Although in fairness, given the technical limitations back in 1963, the
> designers of ASCII did a reasonable job of making something that was usable
> for a subset of American English.)
<snip>

Therein lies the problem - in 1960s there was damn-all chance of a 
computer having the memory needed to hold a full character set for what 
was a minor problem to those working on them, and a similar small chance 
of a TTY display being able to render it.

Fast forward 40 years and the limitations are all too obvious, hence the 
idea of unicode to represent them all.

What I hate about unicode was the idea of adopting 16-bit characters and 
thus breaking so much byte-orientated code that was written, tested, and 
integrated over the history of computing. So the use of UTF-8 is so much 
better, though the variable-length coding nature has its own minor problems.

But yes to all who point out MS' deficiencies in following simple 
standards, it is almost like they want to prevent interoperability...

Regards, Paul