Acquiring DIS 10646

[Sean Leonard]

On 10/3/2015 12:28 PM, Asmus Freytag (t) wrote:
> On 10/3/2015 8:15 AM, Sean Leonard wrote:
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Well, "DIS 10646" is the Draft International Standard, particularly 
>> Draft 1, from ~1990 or ~1991. (Sometimes it might have been called 
>> 10646.1.) Therefore it would likely only be in print form (or printed 
>> and scanned form). It's pretty old. What I understand is that Draft 1 
>> got shot down because it was at variance with the nascent Unicode 
>> effort; Draft 2 was eventually adopted as ISO 10646:1993, and is 
>> equivalent to Unicode 1.1. (10646-1:1993 plus Amendments 5 to 7 = 
>> Unicode 2.0.)
>
> Sean,
>
> you never explained your specific interest in this matter. Personal 
> curiosity? An attempt to write the definite history of character encoding?

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away....

(Okay it really was not that long ago, and it was pretty close at hand 
since it was on this list)

I proposed adding C1 Control Pictures to Unicode. 
<http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2011-m08/0047.html> I am 
resurrecting that effort, but more slowly this time, with more research 
and input from implementers. The requirement is that all glyphs for 
U+0000 - U+00FF be graphically distinct.

Debuggers used to do this by referencing the graphemes in the hardware 
code page, such as Code Page 437, but we have come a long way from 1981, 
so displaying ♣ for 0x05 does not make much modern sense. Merely 
substituting one of the other legacy code pages in for 0x80 - 0x9F does 
not make sense either. The characters of Code Page 437 overlap with 
U+00A0 - U+00FF in that range, for example. (Windows-1252 is somewhat 
more defensible, but Windows-1252 has 5 unassigned code points so it 
would be incomplete.)

Sean