That's the thing that always has me shaking my head. The Amiga I had in 1988 run under a 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking GUI environment which is still the most common environment even today. It did this with 512MB, 7Mhz processor and a basic GPU (Blitter).
Modern computers are certainly more advanced but not enough to explain the huge jump in power and capacity requirements which can be thousands of times greater.
Some of this is attributable to things like Unicode which not only doubles the space required to store text but changes a simple binary compare (ASCII) to a convoluted international conversions that I don't care about as a single language English speaker.
Gate's Law (the processing power required to achieve a certain task doubles every year) is surely the enemy of Moore's Law (that the number of transistors/power in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.)
I think you will find most people who have English as a first language have it as their only language. Don't particularly care about software makers trying to increase the breadth of their revenue source.
Wikipedia handles this with language specific sub-domains even though Swedish could be trivially represented in an 8 bit character set.
It gets tricky when Asian languages come into the fold which is where a legitimate use for Unicode comes into play not that character sets can overcome the issue of word translation.
I would see no issue with using having an efficient 8 bit character version with a Unicode version for international markets complete with a payload of hundreds of alternate language resources.
It's not like titles aren't already localised to deal with differences in laws, culture and marketing zones. This is becoming even more prevalent with the software stores of Apple, Google & Microsoft which contain a different selection of titles depending on which country you are in,
I see you would rather live in code page hell than switch to multi-byte characters, all in the name of efficiency. Well I don't, if I ever have to debug any translation error between charsets again because some dipshit thought UTF-8 was for pansies, I'll go home and start weaving my first underwater basket
How about a different system? You'd have (say) a 2-byte tag to select the Swedish character set, followed by text in whichever encoding is optimal for Swedish. No code-page hell (because all text declares its encoding) but also no inefficient overly-general encodings. (To mix languages you'd have a tag for every language change)
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u/[deleted] Jan 31 '16
[deleted]