> On Wed, 20 Aug 1997, Peter Holzer wrote:
>
> > Alex Belits wrote:
> > >On Wed, 20 Aug 1997, Erik Corry wrote:
> > >
> > >> Unicode is regularly extended, and is incredibly complete in
> > >
> > >...by a commitee.
> >
> > Yes, of course. By who else?
>
> Addendums donated by countries (then reviewed by commitee).
Yes, that is how this works in reality, except that more people than just
countries can make proposals. Which is why there will probably be Klingon
characters soon :-)
> It really wouldn't be so bad if commitees actually worked... This one's
> not TOO bad as they go. (remember Ada anyone?)
Then again, Ada was run by the US military. What do you expect?
Unicode is run by the big computer corporations. And ISO 10646 is run by
ISO (which means that the diverse national standards organizations do the
actual work).
> > >And they don't release free implementation of
> > >it or updates to existing ones after that.
This puzzles me. Just what sort of implementation would you expect them to
publish? Just what _is_ "an implementation of it"?
They sure publish all the tables.
> www.unicode.org, yes? Textfiles full of tables. The visual descriptio
> n
> AFAIK is only in paper form though.... (I've never seen the paper form
> -
> I can't afford it)
ISBN 0-201-48345-9 "The Unicode Standard, Version 2.0", Addison-Wesley,
includes a CD-ROM. The label on my copy suggests I paid DM 124.10 (about
US$ 70, which seems a fair price for that much paper).
> If only Unicode supported continuously growing languages....
> (Big5 does AFAIK but that's about it)
Big5 can't do it any different than Unicode does - someone has to
regularly submit additions.
Of course, it's a really bad way to run a character set; in fact, it
partly defeats the reason for having a character set in the first place.
But Unicode/ISO 10646 sure _can_ accomodate it.
MfG Kai