How to waste computer memory?

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 8:26 AM, BartC <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 17/03/2016 21:11, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Like every language *including* English. You can pretend that ASCII is
>>> enough, but you do lose some information.
>>
>>
>> Hold it, I'll quickly update my résumé before we resume the
>> conversation. What does this exposé expose? At least it gives a coup de
>> grâce to ASCII with grace.
>
>
> 'ANSI' (Windows code page 1252), will do most of what ASCII doesn't, as far
> as western Europe (and the US, Canada, Australia and probably the rest of
> the Americas) is concerned. Including euro and pound (€,£) currency symbols.
>
> ANSI could have been equivalent to the first 256 Unicode code points, rather
> than just 128, if Unicode hadn't squandered codes 128 to 159 on even more
> control codes, when it's difficult to see a use for most of the 32 that
> ASCII already reserves.

The trouble is twofold:

1) Code page 1252 still can't do everything. You can handle most of
western Europe but that's all. No Cyrillic or Greek text, and
definitely no RTL text (Arabic or Hebrew).

2) So the solution is... more codepages, right? NO. A thousand times
no. That just means that no two computers can agree on what character
0xA2 represents.

3) You still can't fit Chinese text into eight bits of space, no
matter how hard you try. (Among our problems are such diverse elements
as...)

So, no. No solution there. And you're just making even more assumptions.

ChrisA