Re: Patch: Promoting characters to 31 bits (for discussion)

Valdis> On Thu, 01 Jul 1999 11:15:53 +0900, you said: Valdis> John Von Neuman once said "4K of memory should satisfy all Valdis> forseeable computational requirements". Good point. I thought for a while before being so rash as to publish a statement like that. JvN should have known better; I'm sure he knew what a Turing machine is. But plain text is different; plain text is historically determined by human language. No matter how creative we get in inventing new languages, I think it is unlikely that human beings are going to come up with 32760+ character sets larger than any currently in use by any single language. (Yes, we could do it before breakfast with cryptographic applications, but the one-time pad sorta suggests we won't _standardize_ them.) If we assume phonetics, we have room for 8.3 million of them.... Valdis> What happens to UCS-4 if Valdis> http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu actually finds Valdis> something? ;) If they're smart enough or old enough or various enough to fill up that thirty-one-bit space, we've got bigger problems than just learning our ABCs. They will have already solved that one, I'm sure; their version of XEmacs will have a Lisp engine with lexical scope and a redisplay that works and can be understood. I can hardly wait! ;) -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ What are those two straight lines for? "Free software rules."