On Wed, 24 Mar 2010, Matthew Barnett wrote (excerpted for brevity):

> <deinx nxtxr> wrote:
>> [...]

>> It doesn't matter if ASCII is short-sighted or not, though it's
>> really not.  The "A" stands for "American" so this coding was only
>> intended to be used for English.
>> 
> Well, American, because it has "#" but lacks "£".

Yes, truly, *A*SCII is the *American* Standard Code for Information
Interchange, and the rest of the world go hang.  We Americans (and part
of my family has been here almost 400 years) can be a very parochial,
shortsighted lot, as if we are the only people who are worth paying
attention to.  It is something of an accident of technological history
that modern computing got its start in the USA, where engineers spoke
only American English and paid no attention to the rest of the world. 
ASCII is something of dead weight from an accident, and if it had not
been for shortsighted US engineers in the first place, we might not
even be having this discussion.

>>                                                       26 letters is
>> plenty for an auxlang to use.

Why?  Is it anything more than an accident of a late-mediaeval
orthography of what was for centuries a marginal language of a small
island nation on the outskirts of Europe?

> Most of the world is going over to Unicode, just as they've gone over
> to metric. In the modern world, ASCII isn't good enough.

Once again, we shortsighted bigoted Americans (and I am an American, as
I say) think that all the world ought to conform to us, just because we
are currently large on the world scene.  I agree, ASCII simply is no
longer good enough, and it is sheer bigotry, in my opinion, to expect
the rest of the world to conform to an accidental engineering history
conducted in US English, rather than Americans, who are actually a
rather small minority, conforming to everybody else.  The problems of
computer software that some people seem to go on about are largely
those of shortsighted anglophones who cannot be bothered to be
concerned about anybody else.

>> Users may have *their own* particular computers set to work with an
>> encoding but try sending an e-mail to someone who doesn't have the
>> capability of presenting that encoding, or had the capability but
>> the default is something else.  [...]

> This suggests that the devices are designed by people who haven't
> thought about the needs of their users! :-)

It is largely because of the shortsighted shortcomings of ASCII and
even ISO that Unicode was developed in the first place, to my
understanding.  Yes, change does not happen overnight, but it does take
place, and I expect that Unicode/UTF or something like it will take
over, whether some shortsighted anglophone programmers like it or not. 
They can be dragged kicking and screaming into the future, or they can
become irrelevant.

>> And if you think it is such a big deal, it is probably one of the
>> major frustrations and turnoffs to Esperanto.  I'd get partways into
>> a document and eventually just decide to stop working on it because
>> I didn't want to hassle with the typography any more.

And I am becoming more and more able to deal with E-o, even though I am
not proficient in it.  Given my own computer setup, which is admittedly
somewhat primitive, if I can begin to deal with it, then anybody can,
if they only will.

-- 
Paul Bartlett