A challenge to the ASCII proponents.

[Ben Finney]

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003 11:53:05 +0100, Alan Kennedy wrote:
> JanC wrote:
>> The verb "gignooskoo" (trying to write it with Latin letters ;)
> Why limit yourself to that nasty little us-ascii alphabet? >;-)

Because it will display reliably on any computer.

> Here it is in a format where almost everybody will be able to see the
> original greek verb on their screen.
> [instructions to cut and paste to a file, then open in a limited range
> of programs, on computers possessing the appropriate font]
> 
> So, the challenge to the ASCII proponents is: put the greek word
> "gignooskoo" on everybody's screen, originating from a usenet message,
> in the original greek, where "oo" -> greek letter omega.

Challenge accepted:

Open any drawing program.  Draw, in order from left to right, the Greek
characters gamma, ipsilon, gamma, nu, omega, sigma, kappa, omega.

Done.  The desired word now appears on the screen.

Oh, what's that -- you say that's cheating because the user has to use
particular programs?  Perform manual steps?  Have some existing
knowledge about the process?  That the process may fail for any of these
reasons?

Those are attributes of the "simple" process of manually manipulating
XML content you gave.

Not every computer is capable of automatically displaying Greek
characters.  Even for those which can, there's not yet a universal way
to instruct them to do so.  Hence, it is not possible to have any
computer automatically display a word with Greek characters.

But you already knew that, so why the silly challenge?

-- 
 \          "Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his |
  `\                                           wife."  -- Groucho Marx |
_o__)                                                                  |
http://bignose.squidly.org/ 9CFE12B0 791A4267 887F520C B7AC2E51 BD41714B