XBOX 360 2569
Ypu don't get the critique, do you?
something similar ... was the MVCL instruction introduced on 370. the source and destination lengths were different and if the source length was less than the...
Save your rethoric.
characters I haven't reached this conclusion ...yet that it is wrong to base computer text on glyphs. I started the exact opposite buttumption--that the only way to encode text...
That need is a real, natural one; and it is served extremely poorly by the various ISO "codepages". The whole centring on "glyphs" is a homongous wrong and should be rectified.
English, Latin and a very few other languages are pretty easy to represent using "monoglyph" layouts like ascii or the ISO8859 codepage style. The majority of languages on the planet has various marks. The ISO8859 codepages are close to unusable for writing clbuttical greek, nor for runic. Diacritical marks are imporant in both; representing the glyphs bring you only part of the way towards a written language. The glyph representation is good enough for some languages, but fail miserably for others.
The number of "base" glyphs among the letter-oriented languages is not very great. There is substaltial overlap between latin (26+7), cyrillic (30+3) and greek (24). (10 common letters, and some other overlap. The plus indicates other letters which can be argued to be borrowed from other scripts or to be ligature). The base letters need a codespace of 80+80 positions and a set of around 20 diacritcal marks. Add numbers and signs (44) and we are still well below 256, as in 8-bit code space. It is almost possible to squeeze in arabic (28+marks) as well in 8-bit space.
Almost all the languages sort with the base letter as primary, and the diacritical as secondary (or ignored).One language may have several options for the treatment of diacriticals. "Phone book" sorting usually ignores it all, together with ignoring whitespace.
Library sorting ignores diacriticals, but preserve whitespace. This is common among languages with different alphabets. Cyrlillic, hebraic, Greeek and arabic script is also co-collated, so a P is sorted next to a pi.
Having the marked glyphs and other aplhabets in separate code space is a huge hbuttle.
After all, they ended up solving this puzzle with an almost generic solution for Vietnamese, which cannot be represented in the ISO8859 style at all.
One thing english-speaking persons never realise is how much the rest of the world alternate between languages. The ISO8859 and UTF-8 styles are not good solutions in this respect.
ISO10646 were onto the right track for a while, but were derailed badly and the pieces can be found as UTF-8.
Actually, the PDP-11 bootstraps (different for different devices) were typically about 5-10 words of 16 bits. And the most used ones were on...
-- mrr
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