From:	David Landgren	Date:	Mon Jan 14 15:42:08 2008
Subject:	Re: regex of the month (decade?)

Chris Dolan wrote:
> On Jan 11, 2008, at 8:01 AM, David Landgren wrote:
> 
>> The benchmark may be flawed, since my appreciation of Unicode is 
>> little more than "things went downhill after 7-bit ASCII".
> 
> Haven't I read that you live in Paris?  I figured that anyone who lives 
> in a country whose dominant language was not fully expressible in ASCII 
> would love Unicode.

I do, but then again French is fully expressible in Latin-1... except 
for the oe ligature (œ).

I worked with a French programmer a few years back who spent much of his 
career working in government computing circles. Apparently when the 
national European computer organisations were thrashing out what 
characters should go where in the 128..255 high ASCII slots, his 
colleague at the time, who was representing France in one of the 
discussions, was out of the meeting having a coffee.

At that point, a vote was taken, and the result was that some other 
accented character like ý or something made it in at the expense of œ. 
What did get in were the decidedly less useful Æ and æ ligatures.

> On a major tangent, have others noticed the resurgence of the umlaut in 
> printed English?  I keep seeing things like coöperation or coördinates 
> -- particularly in Technology Review, but in other publications on 
> occasion too.  Is that because it's *supposed* to be spelled that way, 
> but ASCII and the typewriter have suppressed that spelling for my lifetime?

Funny you should mention that. I read about this first maybe twenty, 
twenty-five years ago proposed as "the way things should really be" but 
never saw it in use. Then last week I read two articles on two different 
web sites that used this convention. I found it quite jarring. What's 
next, "welcome to the reäl world?"

David