A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Martin v. Löwis]

Alan Kennedy <alanmk at hotmail.com> writes:

> To everyone else: Why does this stuff get so complicated? Why does it
> take a multi-lingual + encoding-guru + protocol-guru + markup-guru +
> python-bot like Martin von L to get stuff like this done? Does it have
> to require somebot who writes better quality software (i.e. less
> defective) than the world's leading search engine, Google, who got it
> slightly wrong?

Indeed, it is the bugs in the software that make it so
hard. Fortunately, people like myself have worked hard over the last
10 years or so to get us where we are: writing software, testing
software, reporting bugs. Now much new software is unicode aware, and
may even support it to a large degree. Still, a lot needs to be done.
Most of this is in the minds of developers, to recognize "Unicode
good, byte string bad, Unicode good, byte string bad" :-)

> The idea of raising this came to me when that Russian individual
> posted a message a few days ago that got very garbled in the
> transmission, both subject and content. Again, it was only Martin who
> was able to figure out its content

I made a number of guesses, I admit. It had to be a language which
rarely uses ASCII, and whose encodings don't use bytes < 128. So most
likely it was Greek or Russian - this is expert knowledge one collects
over time. I tried three Russian encodings (again, which one to try
are expert knowledge, and I thought of Windows only last).

Regards,
Martin