Subject: Multiscript Ordering -- Survey on a fundamental issue

From: [email-masked]
Date: 25 Feb 94 17:32:00 -0500

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I would like to have as many people state their preference on the following:

1) Is it acceptable, in an eventual international standard on multiscript
   ordering, to constrain applications to separate different scripts
   (ex.: Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Han, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, and so on) into
   different fields to be compared, so that only one script set would be
   processed at a time?

2) Is it necessary to have no restrictions at all and that any given field
   contain characters from different scripts, given that, anyway, script
   tables will not be intermixed? (nuance: if one wishes, different scripts
   could be intermixed, and considered one script for a given application,
   with the envisaged tailorability feature; this should be considered a
   special case of single script, even if artificial, with a single set of
   processing attributes).

The reason for this question is that different scripts might have different
processing attributes for ordering which should not normally be mixed; if
scripts are not mixed in a given field to be compared, this does not pause big
technical difficulties and the POSIX model can be applied (except that for
characters formed by combining characters, this will require a mod of POSIX
specs, unless the full list of normal combinations is known, which is not the
case so far).

If, on the other hand, scripts are mixed, and if one wants all processing
attributes to be taken into account for each script, then POSIX specs will
have to be changed or they won't be upward compatible with the multiscript
ordering model in preparation.

There are solutions to both preferences (I already presented my views in the
4th UNICODE implementation workshop, end of 1992, in Frankfurt), but there are
compatibility impacts in the second case more than in the first.  The first
preference would allow far more efficient implementations too, but that should
not be an absolute criteria to preclude option 2 if this is a strong
requirement.

I wish I am not too obscure to be understood by all the forums to which I am
sending this request.

Alain LaBont<e'>
Gouvernement du Qu<e'>bec
Secr<e'>tariat du Conseil du tr<e'>sor
1500B, boul. Charest Ouest, 1er <e'>tage
Ste-Foy (Qu<e'>bec), Canada  G1N 2E5
Fax: +1 418 646 3571
Tel: +1 418 644 1835
Email: either [email-masked] or [email-masked]

Editor of Default Tailorable Ordering Standard for the Universal Coded
Character Set (so called UCS, i.e. ISO/IEC 10646)
(Ordering Project: ISO/IEC Project 22.30.02.02)