lasko@video.dec.com (Tim - DSG Terminals Architecture - 223-2186) (04/08/88)
In regard to Mr. Sherwood's complaint re IS 8859-1: >This standard is based on nations rather than languages. So the West European >version doesn't handle Welsh or Catalan or Esperanto (which don't have their >own nations). You perhaps have a copy of an old draft of the standard - the original bias towards nations was pointed out late in 1985 and acted upon. You will find that the current standard lists laguages for which the character repertoire is applicable, instead of nations. Regardless, any particular part of IS 8859 is only capable of supporting a subset of the languages supported by the Telematic service code, IS 6937-2. The latter standard is so capable mainly because it uses the technique of floating accents (non-spacing characters), causing characters with accent marks to be coded in two bytes. The parts of IS 8859 were developed in response to the outcry for fixed length character codes. Catalan and Esperanto are handled through IS 8859-3. Unfortunately, some of the characters for Welsh have not yet been accomodated through the IS 8859 codes -- work progresses, however, in the relevant standards committees to correct this oversight. And as far as linguistic "equality" is concerned, IS 6937-2 doesn't do anything for languages based on Greek or Cyrillic scripts, not to mention Malayam, Indic, or Arabic, or any of the ideographic scripts. Only a few codes developed in the bibliographic community can truly be said to give "equality". Tim Lasko, Digital Equipment Corporation, Maynard, MA lasko@video.dec.com (Member of ANSI and ISO character coding committees) lasko%video.dec@decwrl ------------------------------------------------------------- DISCLAIMER: I speak from my experience with the standards process, not for the company I happen to work for.