re: character sets.....

[Mike O'Dell <[e-mail]>]

just as a warmup.....

	the problem of "character sets" is fundamentally impossible
	to solve in a "universal" fashion for a number of reasons
	having nothing to do with computer science and everything to
	do with Linguistics.  While I'm not a Lingust, I'm married to one
	and have had extensive discussions with a retired Chair of
	the Columbia Linguistics Department (who now does computer
	stuff) and who tracks the "character set standard" efforts
	quite closely (Unicode, 10664, etc).  he is continually amazed
	and amused by what he sees there and the profound lack of deep
	understanding of the subject area revealed by them.

at the next telechat, i'll go over some of his thoughts on the
subject and why it's pointless to bust a gut on the topic.
(although we might make the situation slightly better, we cannot
make it good, much less right.)

	-mo