From owner-sc22wg5 Wed Sep 4 18:09:33 2002 Received: from nameserv.rl.ac.uk (nameserv.rl.ac.uk [130.246.135.129]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id SAA83858 for ; Wed, 4 Sep 2002 18:09:33 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from jkr@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk) Received: from jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk (jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk [130.246.8.20]) by nameserv.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA11298 for ; Wed, 4 Sep 2002 17:10:30 +0100 Received: (from jkr@localhost) by jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk (8.8.8+Sun/8.8.8) id RAA20368 for SC22WG5@dkuug.dk; Wed, 4 Sep 2002 17:14:15 +0100 (BST) Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 17:14:15 +0100 (BST) From: John Reid Message-Id: <200209041614.RAA20368@jkr.cc.rl.ac.uk> To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: SC22 meeting MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dear WG5, I am pleased to tell you that our request for a CD ballot was accepted without debate. So we have passed a significant milestone. I was reappointed as Convener and Dan was appointed as Part 3 editor. On our email problems, Keld Simonsen apologized to me for his lack of action and says that he has a way of catching spam and of making an html index with hot links to the genuine messages. He promised to do this soon (???). Other WGs are not having our problem, however. It was suggested that this may be because we put our address on the web page. I was told that a small disguise such at putting spaces around @ may defeat web crawlers without defeating our friends. I have therefore done this. I have also removed the link to ftp://dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC22/WG5/list which lists all the email addresses of members of our list. You may wish to make your own note of this address. As ever, a lot of SC22 time was occupied with internationalization. We had a presentation by Freytag Asmus on the work of the Unicode Consortium. This meets, usually in USA, every three months and appears to be doing good work on a data base of characters and their properties (now containing more than 94,000 characters). It is anxious to take all cultures into account and a new release of the data base is made about every 11 months with old releases being retained. There is considerable overlap with WG20, which appears to be disfunctional, and a resolution included an instruction to WG20 to work in a harmonious and constructive way with the the Unicode Consortium. There were two things relevant to our work that I learnt: 1. Rather than specifying ISO_10646 in our SELECTED_CHAR_KIND intrinsic, we should perhaps consider the three encodings of it: UTF-8, UFT-16, UTF-32. UTF-16 appears to have a lot of merit and is catching on. It involves variable-width 16-bit strings. There are 2048 special 16-bit values, which allow the frequently-used characters to be represented directly in 16 bits and the rest (actually up to 1,048,576) to be represented as a pair of specials. No 'escape' mechanism is needed since the special characters may be recognized directly. The Unicode Consortium wishes programming languages to support this data type. 2. Other languages are beginning to allow international characters in identifiers (names). I can see their merit for codes that are intended never to leave the host culture or for private names within a module that will always be maintained within the host culture. Best wishes, John. P.S. It was pleasantly warm (around 20C), despite being north of the arctic circle.