[aklug] Re: What should I consider before doing an install?

On Thu, 30 Jun 2011, Christopher Howard wrote:

> At the risk of starting a flame war, that really isn't true. For starters, i find the mathematical/logical/programming/publishing symbols to be pretty helpful. Furthermore, it should be noted that the UTF-8 helps English typists by allowing them to occasionally insert foreign language content without switching to a totally foreign encoding. (E.g., ligatures and accents become available.)

:-) I don't see this one escalating to flame war status. For what I do,
though, I still couldn't care less. In 30+ years everything all my needs
have been satisfactorily fulfilled by C & ASCII. As I said, non-English
speakers are the primary beneficiaries of it. While I have dabbled in
languages in the past, 100% of my computing is in English. Even when I
e-mail Japanese friends I could always fall back on romanji.

As for mathematical formulas, I've been happy to deal with rendered output
from tools like tetex, and drawing programs like xfig handle schematics
quite nicely... and the file format for both is in ASCII. ;-)

So, I'd wager the vast majority of the English-speaking world can get by
without unicode. For the minority that can't, go for it. I'm not wasting
my development time on unicode support in Nevaeh Linux, though.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Thu Jun 30 13:30:43 2011