Subject: LC comments on draft-klensin-net-utf8-07.txt

From: Jeffrey Hutzelman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:40:22 -0500

The following sentence appears near the beginning of section 4:

> In retrospect, one of the
> advantages of ASCII [X3.4-1978] when it was chosen was that the code
> space was full when the Standard was first published.  There was no
> practical way to add characters or change code point assignments
> without being obviously incompatible.

I don't think I've seen this observation made in writing before, and it is 
interesting.  However, I see a couple of problems.  Particularly, the fact 
that there was no way to change code point assignments without being 
obviously incompatible did not in fact prevent such changes.  While that 
change is little more than a footnote today (few people have documents 
lying around whose meaning depends on the left-arrow and up-arrow and are 
destroyed by using underscore and caret instead), a similar change today to 
either ASCII or Unicode could be disastrous, depending on the code points 
changed.

Secondly, the reference tag [X3.4-1978] is wrong, as the target of the 
reference is actually X3.4-1968 (and in fact the references section uses 
the wrong tag, but the correct citation).

-- Jeff

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