On 17/06/06, Juergen Strobel <strobel / secure.at> wrote:
> I am unaware of unsolveable problems with Unicode and Eastern
> languages, I asked specifically about it. If you think Unicode is
> unfixably flawed in this respect, I guess we all should write off
> Unicode now rather than later? Can you detail why Unicode is
> unacceptable as a single world wide unifying character set?
> Especially, are there character sets which cannot be converted to
> Unicode and back, which is the main requirement to have Unicode
> Strings in a non-Unicode environment?

They aren't so much unsolvable problems as mutually incompatible
approaches. Unicode is concerned with the semantic meaning of a
character, and ignores glyph variations through the 'Han unification'
process. TRON encoding doesn't use Han unification: it encodes the
historically-same Chinese character differently for different
languages/regions where they are written differently today. Mojikyo
encodes each graphically distinct character differently and includes a
very wide range of historical characters, and is therefore
particularly suited to certain linguistic and literary niches.

In spite of this, I think that Unicode is an excellent choice for
everyday usage. Unicode does have a solution to the problem of
character variants, but it's not a universal back end for all
encodings.

Incidentally, it is said that TRON is the world's most widely-used
operating system, so supporting that encoding is not necessarily a
minor concern.

Paul.