home .. forth .. colorforth mail list archive ..

Re: [colorforth] Unused character encodings available in Colorforth


On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Roman Pavlyuk (personal) wrote:

> Just a silly idea (as all of them at this time of day):
>
> What if map English (or even a subset of human) dictionary into Unicode,

Unicode a character map, not a word map right?

> you'll get about 65000 words, and each Forth word can be expressed with 16
> bit, add some service tokens, for numbers and for joining words into phrases
> to get 2- and 3- and more-word identifiers.
>
> I'm not joking. Since words are not made of characters, but encode symbols
> (=entities), it'll be internationalized ipso factum.
>
> Well, 32 bit words can be useful for colors and flavours (flavor can be an
> adjective).
>
> Does anyone see any serious drawbacks?
>

Its a nice idea, would it work in practice? When you give a name to
something, you make an abstraction, does this abstraction make sense to
someone in a different language? Also not all forth names are words, some
are acromyns, some are technical terms. Documentation would remain a
problem, unless you could desribe the specication of words formally.

Mark


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: colorforth-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: colorforth-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Main web page - http://www.colorforth.com