ISO/IEC 10646 compatibility

[Johan van Wingen <PRECAL@RULMVS.LEIDENUNIV.NL>]

>Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1993 08:35:36 -0800 (PST)
>From: dank@BLACKS.JPL.NASA.GOV
>Subject: Compatibility with Unicode
>Sender: wg-char-request@RARE.NL
>To: ietf-charsets <ietf-charsets@INNOSOFT.COM>
>Cc: dank@BLACKS.JPL.NASA.GOV
>
>You've probably already discussed this, but ...
>
>Several major OS's appear to be comitted to using 16-bit Unicode.
>Therefore the larger character set this list is discussing must be
>compatible with Unicode at least to the degree that it can be displayed
>in degraded form on Unicode PC's, and allow Unicode text to be mapped in.
>Preferably this should be possible without huge lookup tables.

The International Standard for Multiple-octet Coded Character Sets is
ISO/IEC 10646. It specifies coding with two octets (UCS-2) or 4 octets
(UCS-4). The UCS-2 coding is now adopted by Unicode, thus implementers
should refer to the source, that is the ISO standard. (It is TWO octets,
NOT 16 bits.)

>One solution would be to keep Unicode's Han unification, but add two bits
>above and beyond Unicode to indicate the language of each
>Han character.  When mapping to Unicode, these two bits could simply
>be thrown away, just as upper and lower case ASCII are displayed on
>an old upper-case only terminal by throwing away a single bit.

This would NOT be a conforming implementation of 10646, such as would be
required in procurement specifications. Rules of procurements for the
European Governments are becoming very strict, and NO conformance will
mean NO orders.

If you want to stay in business in the future, you shoud base your
products on adopted standards, not on gossip or private hobbies.

>Borka writes:
>>The editor of ISO 10 646 is Japanese - Masami Hasegava.
>Does anyone have Masami Hasegava's e-mail address?

Borka should know better. At the SC2 Plenary meeting in Athens (where
she was) he resigned and was succeeded by Mark Davies.

Best regards from J. W. van Wingen
Netherlands Delegate to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 Characters and Coding
PRECAL@HLERUL2.BITNET or PRECAL@rulmvs.LeidenUniv.nl